Ordinary People, Exceptional Movie

A Mother/Son Disconnect - Pic courtesy of Paramount

by blogSpotter

Before I embark on my movie review, I ‘d like to touch on a couple of things...

The blog lives -- Much as the Mayans miscalculated when the world would end, I miscalculated when this blog would end.  I still have some poorly expressed ideas to get out there.   Clumsily, herkily and jerkily -- I will share my point of view.  For a while longer anyway... you lucky few readers.  :-)

Sandy Hook and the NRA -- It looks like the National Rifle Association wants to turn every public school into a preadolescent version of Dodge City.  The idea that every school house should be turned into a military encampment is frighteningly stupid. Enough already -- let’s restrict the sale of assault weapons and be done with it.   

Chromebook -- This blog is being typed on a beautiful silver-green Acer Chromebook.  In my previous blog entry, I errored on the price. It’s only $199.  An iPod Touch costs more than that; accessories for the Surface tablet cost more than that.   My Chromebook has the light, sleek feel of a Macbook Air only at ⅕ of the price.  It boots in 14 seconds.   The Hexxeh USB drive that I used for my Chromium trial was not an officially supported distribution -- thus its problems with Adobe Flash.   This beauty runs everything fine and receives regular updates.  There are of course, limitations. You can’t install “normal” software with drivers -- no Quicken or iTunes.  But, I’m willing to explore options for something so light, beautiful and fast.

AND NOW THE CINEMA...

I took a walk down memory lane yesterday and watched 1980’s Ordinary People, directed by Robert Redford.   The movie stars Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore as Calvin and Beth Jarrett; they play an affluent couple grappling with the boating death of their older teenage son.   The younger son, Conrad is played perfectly by Timothy Hutton; Judd Hirsch plays a psychiatrist who guides Conrad and Calvin through the Hellish grief and confusing, sometimes destructive thoughts that accompany such a tragic event.  

The stand-out performance is Mary Tyler Moore, who superficially seems like the perfect Highland Park wife.   But her glib elegance and beauty conceal a vindictive ice queen who hasn’t come to her own terms -- that of losing a favored son and feeling a secret resentment toward the already guilt-ridden surviving son.   She comes across as a surface-level person who is mostly concerned about “how things look” and not ever “how things are”. Such a cognitive disparity creates a giant fissure in a family that needs to move toward forgiveness and not frigid divisiveness.  

The performances are superb in this milestone movie. Ordinary People was ahead of its time by about 10 years -- it dealt intelligently and sensitively with topics of recovery and personal discovery.   It has aged extremely well in 32 years -- the music and styles evoke affluence and traditional comfort in an upscale area. If not for a few scenes with cars you might think it was made in the 1990’s or 2000’s. I found the movie on iTunes, for $2.99 -- a bargain for a truly thought-provoking excursion.   We live in a self-help society -- Ordinary People sheds some light on why we need so much help.

© 2012 blogSpotter

Chromium Interlude

Almost there - Pic by blogSpotter

by blogSpotter

We’re deeply into Christmas season and I’m hearing the songs of Johnny Mathis, Andy Williams, Perry Como and everyone else associated with this mellow, chestnut-roasted season.   A version of Hell would be where you have to listen to these forever and always, all through the year.  I’ll put away my inner Scrooge to remark on the weather..Dallas has had a freaky warm spell with temps in the high 70’s for the first week of December -- odd but I’m OK with it.  

This week, I did a geek thing (imagine that!).   I was intrigued by the sleek $299 Samsung Chromebook I saw at Best Buy.  I decided to “try before I buy” and installed the Chromium OS on a 4GB USB stick.  If I were less lazy I’d look up the web link for the install process -- just Google it.  I have a 2009 Acer Aspire netbook which runs Windows 7.  It ran like a whiz when it was new, but I fear it’s developed the dreaded “Windows-sclerosis”.  That’s a condition where viruses, trojans, obsolete files, bloated software and other things bring your system to a crawl.  It happens to systems in the 3 to 5 year age bracket.  I'm sure that a more vigilant me could prevent this.

Anyhow, I decided Mr. Aspire would be the perfect candidate for Chromification. That is exactly what I did to it.  As a matter of fact, I’m preparing this blog on my Acer “Chrome Book”.  I have some impressions to share both PRO and CON...

PRO’s

1. It boots in 30 seconds... the only thing faster would be an “instant-on” iPad.
2. It has a clean, pretty, minimal interface.   As a Windows Vista critic once said, an OS should mainly get the hell out of the way...   Chromium does that admirably.
3. If you’re not doing intense photo editing or gaming (I’m not) -- Chromium comes with everything you need for web-surfing, blogging, shopping, emailing and Facebooking. I’m typing this blog with Office-compatible Google docs.
4. It does system updates without fuss or fanfare.  Chromium (for the most part, see CONs) doesn’t require the user to have a Masters in Computer Science.

CON’s

1. This Chrome Vanilla release has a fairly serious glitch -- it won’t play Adobe Flash videos. If you try, the provider (eg, Netflix) will tell you that you don’t have the latest Flash Player.  If you click to download it, Chromebook intervenes to tell you that you already have it.  
2. Chromium can’t disguise or escape its Linux roots.  It gives cryptic, weird messages on some things if you go off the “happy path”.  
3. I tried to download Firefox browser -- it happily downloaded a file whose type I didn’t recognize.  It now sits in my Download folder like a mysterious comp sci artifact.    Both Windows and Mac know that I’m lazy, in a hurry and don’t want to learn anything about unpacking a tar file.  When I say “install” that’s it -- I want it to automagically install.  

So where does that leave me?   For blogging and trivial stuff, I’m fine.  I can zap around to any site... This certainly won’t be an entertainment machine until Adobe flash gets figured out.  

The visuals are nice -- I have an undersea wallpaper and a tropical fish sign-on icon.  If Google can figure out some of the above-mentioned problems, this could be a big seller.  At $299, the Chromebook is at least $100 less than the next cheapest anything (tablet, phone, computer).  I never thought I’d see a flavor of Linux that breaks through the circle of Geek but Chromium almost does.   I’ll keep watching this to see what it might do next.     

© 2012 blogSpotter