kidchamp dot net

06.28.05

vocab query of the day, brought to you by the getcrafty forums: “stick your face in the hole so we can take your picture thingies” like this are called tintamareski in finnish. is there an elegant and/or brief term for them in english?

giant (++1/2). in the intro to the just-released dvd, director george stevens defends his crew for taking three years to finish the movie because of the many man hours that filmgoers have spent enjoying it since 1956. man hours indeed, as we were exhausted after watching the thing. i’m not sure the running time could be helped, as giant addresses – along with a jillion other issues – racism, sexism, alcoholism, consumerism, texans’ relationship with mexicans, vietnam, and the disappearance of the frontier. my beef is with the editors’ shocking lack of narrative intuition: though liz taylor’s marriage to rock hudson is a central theme, we leap straight from their first (snarky) meeting in maryland to a newlywed bedroom scene en route to the ranch. a peripheral soldier’s funeral, on the other hand, lasts five minutes, most of which are extended shots of a mexican boys’ choir. liz taylor’s journey through the decades is evidenced mostly in the color of her hair, while james dean playing a fiftysomething at 23 (the movie wrapped three weeks before he was killed) manages to look like sean penn twenty years from now. all in all, exhausting but diverting.