A few things struck me while watching the movie this time around. First, it probably would have been better with someone who was *not* Jack Nicholson. While I know how things are going to turn out from having both seen the movie before and having read the book, there really just isn’t any question from the start that Jack Torrance is a tightly bottled lunatic. Nicholson is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a subtle actor–his scenery-chewing is entertaining and frightening, but I think the effect would have been greater had he been able to turn it down a few notches in the early scenes. As it is, watching him grin and ape and arch his eyebrows, I find myself wondering how anyone else in the movie wouldn’t have recognize immediately that Jack Torrance is bad news.

That’s not to say his performance isn’t good. In particular, I was impressed by the scene where Danny goes back to their room in the hotel to get his fire truck and finds Jack sitting on the bed (he’s supposed to be sleeping). Jack calls Danny over to sit down next to him on the bed–the audience knows Jack is already losing his mind, so we’re on edge about what he might say or do to Danny. Instead, Jack hugs him, and for a few minutes, we see a father who loves his child and seems to be trying to find a way back to sanity. Just as we’re starting to feel safe with the scene, and edge begins creeping back into Jack’s questions and answers. Nicholson slowly dials up the crazy, and with it, the tension. It’s an incredibly unnerving scene, and a great performance by Nicholson.

The other thing I realized while watching the movie this time around is that Wendy Torrance deserves a lot more credit than she tends to get as an early example of the Final Girl. Most of that credit usually goes to Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. Wendy spends the first half of The Shining trying to put a good face on things, and I’ll admit that her “Gee whiz, this place sure is great, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any place so great!” lines start to grate on my nerves faily early on.

As Jack starts going over the edge and Wendy starts to realize how bad things actually are, though, she’s surprisingly resourceful and resilient. Sure, she’s always about five seconds from completely losing her shit, but in her situation, who wouldn’t be? She hangs on to the baseball bat, knocks Jack out, and then has the presence of mind to lock him in the storage room instead of just running away.

I still feel bad for Scatman Crothers’ Dick Halloran. Pays for his own airfare, rents a Snow-Cat, drives all the way up to the Overlook Hotel in a blizzard, and then gets unceremoniously whacked in the chest with an axe for his troubles. His role in the film is more or less that of a plot device–he explains to the audience that Danny has “the shine,” and then he serves to get get a spare Snow-Cat to the hotel so that Wendy and Danny can escape at the end. Aside from that, he could be dropped from the film and have no real impact on the story.

“Room 237,” the first full-length documentary by the director Rodney Ascher, examines several of the most intriguing of these theories. It’s really about the Holocaust, one interviewee says, and Mr. Kubrick’s inability to address the horrors of the Final Solution on film. No, it’s about a different genocide, that of American Indians, another says, pointing to all the tribal-theme items adorning the Overlook Hotel’s walls. A third claims it’s really Kubrick’s veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings.

For the record, I think Kubrick did the right thing by never stating what he thought the film was supposed to “mean.” Like any good work of art, the film is open to the viewer’s interpretation.

If you have some time to kill, I highly recommend watching some of the fan-made analysis videos on YouTube. As mentioned in the Times article, Rob Ager’s videos are particularly good:

I stumbled across his spatial analysis video a while back. It’s a little further down the road toward crank-dom, but worth watching nonetheless:

Back when people still had to pay for music, money served to limit and define consumption. You could only afford so many records, so you bought what you could, listened to the radio or watched MTV, and ignored everything else. Those select few who did manage to hear everything—record store clerks, DJs, nerds with personal warehouses—could use this rare knowledge to terrorize their social or sexual betters, as in the pre-internet-era film High Fidelity. Napster made all of that obsolete. Today, almost every person I know has more music on his computer than he could ever know what to do with. You don’t need to care about music to end up like this—the accumulation occurs naturally and unconsciously. My iTunes library, for example, contains forty-seven days of music. According to the column that counts the number of times I’ve played each song, roughly a sixth of that music has never been listened to at all. In the 21st century, we are all record store clerks.

I’ve still got some stuff on the NAS in my office that dates back to the glory days of Napster (Comsat Angels and Teardrop Explodes compilations, I’m looking at you…). The “free” part sure didn’t hurt, but I think a lot of it was the sudden accessibility of all this music I’d never heard before.

What you need to cut down on the time politicians spend fundraising isn’t less money in politics. It’s easy money. Generous public financing of the campaign of any major party nominee for Congress would ensure that even a terrible fundraiser stands of chance of getting elected. Being bad would still be a disadvantage. But today it’s a disadvantage to be ugly, stupid, inarticulate, or corrupt, and yet we still have ugly, stupid, inarticulate, and corrupt members of Congress. What we don’t have are members of Congress who can’t raise money.

This got me to thinking about campaign finance reform, which I haven’t written about much since the whole Citizens United brouhaha last year. My feeling then (and still now) was that I think it’s bad for democracy that anyone and everyone is able to pour bazillions of dollars into elections. However, I have yet to hear a solution that doesn’t cast far too wide a net.

Reading Yglesias’s post sent me down a slightly different path, though. Political campaigns cost huge amounts of money—national campaigns, certainly, but even state and local races are expensive affairs. There aren’t laws or regulations we can pass that will change that fact in any meaningful way, so people running for political office are going to need a lot of money, and it’s going to come from somewhere. We can write all the laws we want saying one group or another can’t spend in elections, but the money will still find its way into the process, because the people running for office need it.

So in that description, replace the word “money” with the word “drugs,” and you’ve basically got the argument for the legalizing drugs and eliminating the supply-side approach of prohibition-type strategies. What’s weird, though, is that I’d be willing to bet a large percentage of the people who think we need to keep money out of politics also think we ought to legalize drugs.

I tend to agree with Matt that public financing of elections would be the best solution to the problem, but I just don’t see how that’s going to happen in the current climate of anti-spending hysteria. Absent that, it really seems like disclosure of contributions is what we’re left with.

Most of the analyses I’ve read of these decisions comes to the conclusion that they are mostly means of avoiding giving Apple its 30% cut on in-app purchases.

Thus, my question: why would Apple stop with in-app purchases? Why not declare they are going to take a cut of in-browser purchases as well? It’s their platform/channel, so I’m not sure how the same logic used to justify the in-app purchase tax doesn’t apply to the browser as well. The obvious response is “They would be crazy to do that,” but that doesn’t actually answer the question.

Update: It seems that the Financial Times has gone the HTML5 route as well, and to some degree of success.

A senior executive at Opera Software said he was “very flattered” that Amazon launched its Silk browser on Wednesday, but that Opera had already refined the concept of cloud browsing years earlier.

Seriously?

Opera is the BeOS of the browser world. Barely anyone uses it, but the few people who do use it are constantly clogging up user forums and comment threads going on about how amazingly awesome it is, how much more advanced it is than anything else out there, how it will make sandwiches for you (and tasty ones, too!), and on, and on, and on.

Great, so you refined the concept of cloud browsing five years ago. How’s that working out for you and your 1.65% market share?

Big Y Foods, which has 61 locations in Connecticut and Massachusetts, recently became one of the latest to announce it was phasing out the self-serve lanes. Some other regional chains and major players, including some Albertsons locations, have also reduced their unstaffed lanes and added more clerks to traditional lanes.

Market studies cited by the Arlington, Va.-based Food Marketing Institute found only 16 percent of supermarket transactions in 2010 were done at self-checkout lanes in stores that provided the option. That’s down from a high of 22 percent three years ago.

Overall, people reported being much more satisfied with their supermarket experience when they used traditional cashier-staffed lanes.

Maybe I’m just a weirdo, but I vastly prefer the self-check lanes to dealing with those staffed by cashiers.

I tend to do my grocery shopping in small, frequent chunks, and that probably works better for the self-check lanes than if I had to ring out a huge shopping cart filled with stuff and then bag it all myself. Additionally, a significant part of the appeal of the self-check lanes is that there is almost always at least one totally open, whereas the cashier lanes tend to have lines.

Mostly, I think it would be a shame if store eliminate the option due to the technological aversion of some of their customers.

So far, it’s pretty great. The opening 30ish minutes are fairly light-hearted, with Master Ip trying to balance his quiet home life with a stream of martial artists showing up on his doorstep to challenge him to duels. The story turns darker with the Japanese invasion of China. While it is relatively standard “Will the reluctant warrior emerge from retirement to defend his people?” sort of tale, it is well done.

This is a kung fu movie, though, so the story is really only a vehicle for getting us to the fighting. While I am not a connoisseur of these movies, the fighting in this one is awesome. The choreography is quite good, and the film avoids the frenetic editing that tends to plague action movies.

Ip Man is available on Netflix streaming, and definitely worth checking out.

WebWorkerDaily has a post about a recently released survey showing a gap between what employers say about flexible work schedules, and how the implementation of those policies is perceived by employees:

Recently, HR consultancy WorldatWork decided to take a closer look at managers’ true attitudes towards flexible working, polling 2,312 employees in six countries (Brazil, China, India, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States) in late 2010. The results out now show a chasm between rhetoric and reality when it comes to flexible working:

While, 80 percent of respondents claimed to support family-friendly workplaces and arrangements such as remote work, more often than not their behavior didn’t match their beliefs

My personal experience is that the gap results from a failure of the overall organization to adapt to the existence of flex-work programs. Sure, we’ll let employees work from home, or set up alternate (i.e., non-9to5) schedules, but we won’t give them any support in maintaining those arrangements.

There is an implicit assumption that everyone works the same hours. Even if an you have worked out an alternate arrangement with your manager, you’re the one stuck telling people “Sorry, I’m not in the office on Mondays” when they send you a meeting request, and you end up looking the jerk who is getting something for free.

And yes, that was Angus Scrimm. I suppose it is probably a bit too much to ask that he actually be playing The Tall Man, but still… ANGUS SCRIMM.

I realize that it is generally a fool’s game to attempt a meaningful judgement of a film’s worth based solely on a trailer, but good lord—THIS MOVIE LOOKS AWESOME.