"True Grit" [movie, review]

Omaha and I went to see the new True Grit. There are no spoilers because this isn't a film about plot-- either you know it and know what'll happen, or you're culturally illiterate and don't know who John Wayne was.

But it's an excellent piece of cinematography, with vast vistas, wonderful sets (with only two obvious moments of green screen), and the acting is astounding. How Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld didn't walk away with Oscars only points to the strength of last year's field. The Coen's legendary ear for dialogue is absolutely everywhere, especially in the way they dug up old aphorisms and used them without being obvious about it.

There's only one weak point in the film, and it's at the end, and you might be forgiven for it by assuming the villain, who's cunning but not very bright, was ( minor spoiler )

.

Still, that's a minor quibble with some solid explanations. You'll go for the acting and the dialogue, which are the real reason to go see a Coen film anyway.

You want customers with that? or... Maybe it's marketing brilliance!

After the movie, Omaha and I went to the local shopping mall. She had to buy some nice clothes for an upcoming conference, and I needed to take back an herb mill that had shattered the first time I tried to put cinnamon through it. The instructions said it could handle cinnamon; guess not.

As I was walking back, I past the Jamba Juice, a place that sells sweet fruit-and-yogurt blends mixed with all sorts of miscellany designed to make these calorie-packed carbohydrate repositories seem healthier than they are. The line was long, and a sign on the glass outside caught my attention. My first thought was, "Aha! Apostrophe abuse."

Our system's are very slow

And as I read on further it became clear there was a comma splice:

today, we apologize for any

I whipped out my notebook and started writing this down. As I did so, I thought, I know the word on the next line would be "inconvenience." Wouldn't it be awesome if they got the i-before-e rule wrong? Actually, they didn't get that wrong. They just can't spell:

inconvience.

[sic] Brilliant! Now that's marketing to the King of the Hill crowd!

We spend millions of dollars developing and deploying spell-checking systems, and yet a store manager can't be bothered to actually run it before showing her ridiculousness to the world.

In which I am briefly culturally insensitive...

On the new Seattle Light Rail system that goes from the airport to downtown, there are several stops between that are destined to become gentrification hubs in the coming twenty years, pushing out the low-to-middle income, ethnically mixed demographics that currently occupy that corridor. That low-income, low-political-power population also probably why it was politically expedient to put the train along that corridor in the first place.

While we were on the train today, I saw a "Guide to Sound Transit Art along the Light Rail Line." I picked it up and entertained myself with the safe choices the art board had made, along with an explanation for each. Some made sense: A tiara for the high-end shopping center at the end of the line; opera glasses for the station below the symphony center; even the canoe for the station near the Duwamish River makes sense if you know your local history.

But the Othello Street Station line's icon makes no sense. It's of a deer. And the explanation reads, "We chose a deer to honor the local fauna."

Othello Street Station is in the middle of one of the most dense light-industrial zones in King County. There hasn't been a deer sighted there in years! You know what I think? "We chose a deer because the icon of a white woman being strangled by a black man egged on by a lying Jew wouldn't go over very well."