Weekend Video

I was listening to an interview on NPR with Greg Mottola, the director of "Superbad", when they played the scene where Fogell gets his fake i.d. - one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite summer movies. Listening to it on the radio with just the sound, I was knocked out by how good the dialog was and how one sharp line follows another. So try listening to it first without watching.

I generally have pretty highbrow/artsy taste in movies, but if you haven't seen the film I can't recommend it highly enough. It may be a teen "gross-out" comedy, but it's a near perfect movie with a great narrative, a great script, and wonderful performances from a cast who if not famous at the time have nearly all gone on stardom.

What You See is Not Always What You Get...

Over the last few years, New York Magazine has established itself as one of the leading exponents of great photography. Mixing photo-journalism, pick-up, and the creative commissioning of fine art photographers, the magazine can regularly be counted on to deliver eye-catching images. Under Director of Photography Jody Quon (a longtime deputy to the New York Times Magazine's Kathy Ryan) and Editor Adam Moss the art of matching subject and photographer is both astute and surprising.

A great example is last week's memorable picture of gender-bending model Andrej Pejic by the renowned French photographer Valerie Belin. Belin does not usually do editorial work so the choice was as inspired as the result. On the surface, it's a photographic Gainsborough portrait. A beautiful person beautifully rendered in a distinctive style, but when you understand that the subject is in fact a man, you can't help but be drawn back to study the picture in greater detail to see what clues, if any, you missed. It's "The Crying Game" in a single frame. A picture worth at least the thousand words that you can read here.