by Raj Ranade

“You’re going to die,” says Ottway to the man. The blood spilling from the man’s severed artery suggests that this is true. Ottway is sympathetic. So are the rest of the plane crash survivors looking on. But Ottway has no use for comforting lies. He faces death without illusions. He tells the man death will be a warmth that slides over him as they both shiver in the Alaskan snow. He tells the man to think about the people he loves. And when the man is gone he gets back to the business of survival with nary a wasted word. At its best, The Grey is a lot like Ottway. It is tough and unsentimental and honest about the limits of the human body. It has a simple, spare roughness to it, like an Ernest Hemingway short story. It made me want to drink a shot of whisky and write short, declarative sentences.

At least until I thought better of it. But this new movie from director Joe Carnahan is a wonderful surprise in a month where the quality movie landscape is usually as barren as the film’s frozen tundra. It’s also perhaps the best thing that Liam Neeson has done since his unlikely transformation into action-movie tough-guy. Neeson is the increasingly rare kind of action star that doesn’t rely on martial-arts mastery, a beefcake physique, or pretty-boy looks as the key to his appeal. He’s more a Charles Bronson type, nothing but pure distilled conviction and gravity. On paper, a line like “In the next five seconds, I’m going to start beating the sh*t out of you, and you’re going to swallow a lot of blood!” seems like a joke. When Neeson says it on screen – well, you’ll laugh, but you’ll sure as hell believe him.

Neeson plays Ottway, a wolf hunter working for an Alaskan oil rig whose inner demons have him contemplating suicide. After that plane crash strands Ottway and a select group of survivors in the Alaskan wilderness, there are more palpable demons to worry about – specifically, packs of marauding, man-eating wolves. Carnahan smartly makes the wolves into a presence that is felt more often than it’s seen – he and cinematographer Masanobu Takanayagi like to capture the wolves obscured by darkness, with only their eyes glinting menacingly in the night. People have complained about the plausibility of these wolves (they apparently do not attack humans very often), but that’s kind of besides the point – they seem to be as much ghostly metaphor as real, present danger.

The plot mechanics of The Grey resemble wilderness survival stories like Cast Away or 127 Hours, with characters improvising and battling their way to another day of survival – key MacGyverisms here include wooden branches tipped with shotgun shells and a leaping man serving as a grappling hook of sorts. The tone, however, is somewhere else entirely. Those other movies are Testaments to the Power of the Human Spirit^TM, optimistically viewing human willpower at its most lofty heights.

The Grey is interested in that kind of resilience too, but it’s also equally interested in how willpower can break down, and what motivators do and don’t work to get people through each day (religion is certainly not one of them in this film – the movie’s credo is best seen in the oddly inspiring moment where Ottway cries out to God for help, but then decides “F*ck it – I’ll do it myself”). Amidst all the adrenaline-juicing that the film does, it’s nothing less than a bracingly honest examination of both man’s place in the universe and the ways men face the end of that temporary position. There are flaws here (almost every extended conversation in the film is essentially redundant) and I don’t want to oversell it too much. But it is a good film. It is brave and honest and real and true. I liked it very much.

Like The Grey, Shame is an endurance test, but it’s a less rewarding one. This story about a suffering sex addict in New York City is unquestionably well-acted and gorgeously shot, but it also struck me as a needlessly aestheticized bore, an emperor without clothes in more ways than one.

The film centers on a frequently naked man played by Michael Fassbender who is less a character than an abstraction of sex addiction. What we know about him is that he watches a lot of porn, masturbates in his office bathroom, solicits hookers, participates in furtive bar hookups, and has a weird, possibly incestuous relationship with his sister (Carey Mulligan). What we don’t ever know about him is what he does for a living beyond “generic wealthy executive type”, if there is any aspect of him as a person beyond hopeless sex addict, and just why he has a weird, possibly incestuous relationship with his sister. There’s plenty of avant-garde gestures to keep you guessing – Ms. Mulligan drags out each note of “New York, New York” to twice the necessary length in a nightclub performance while her brother sheds a single tear, there’s an extended tracking shot of Fassbender jogging, and characters in each shot are frequently boxed in by the lines of walls and windows to show their isolation.

There are moments here where director Steve McQueen stops being coy about what he’s trying to communicate and the movie springs to life – like the sequence where Fassbender goes on a date and we get actual insights into his worldview and the stunted way in which he connects to people. But most of this film is just a collection of behavior and enigmatic moments onto which you can project any meaning that you wish, all set to a truly obnoxious score that carpet-bombs the film with mournful sentiment. I suppose there’s value in illustrating the condition of sex addiction on film, since it’s not something that gets talked about very often. But there’s no need for it to lean as hard as it does on the crutch of ambiguity – addiction may be a dehumanizing condition, but that doesn’t absolve McQueen from the need of finding real humanity in his characters. Don’t worry, though, if you really wanted to see Fassbender in an insightful movie about sexuality – David Cronenberg’s excellent new film about Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, A Dangerous Method, will be in town within the next few weeks.

by Raj Ranade

First off: if you’ve never seen a silent movie (which I suspect is true for a lot of people reading), head to the Kentucky Theatre straight away and give The Artist a chance. There’s a perception that silent movies are musty art-house relics that can’t connect with modern audiences – a perception that The Artist is expressly designed to demolish. This crowd-pleasing story of a silent movie star transitioning into a talky new Hollywood is practically pharmaceutical in its attempt to shoot straight to the pleasure centers of your brain. And silent cinema in general is a wholly different and fascinating beast from sound film – you’ll be impressed by how much filmmakers can convey with a minimum of words, and stunned at how lazy modern filmmakers leaning on sound can be. Finally, you’ll want to be in the know about the clear front-runner for Best Picture at the Oscars. So go! Have one of those new bourbon cocktails from their concession stand! Enjoy!

Back? If you’re like me, you remain impressed by the film’s gushing charm and frothy humor – and somewhat baffled that this is the Best Picture front-runner. I don’t want to undersell how irresistible this film can be at times. Jean Dujardin, as the star sinking into obscurity because of his refusal to speak on film, has the light grace and easy humor of a Gene Kelly (the movie is essentially a silent remake of his Singin’ in the Rain), and he has tremendous chemistry with co-star Berenice Bejo, the ingenue rising as her Hollywood crush is falling. A remarkably well-trained Jack Russell Terrier also arguably outperforms them both and makes The Artist the most effective puppy commercial since Marley & Me. And director Michel Hazanavicius has a wonderful light touch for sight gags, musical numbers, and the occasional smart lo-fi special effect – like the film’s peak, where Hazanavicius breaks a few of the rules he has set out for himself in this project.

But the fact that I’m citing an adorable puppy as a key virtue of the film should indicate that the irresistibility here is of a lowest-common-denominator kind, leaning hard on the cute and cuddly. That’s not always a bad thing, but it grates when a feather-light farce starts trying to wring tears out of you. When the film sinks into a maudlin mode towards its climax, it feels forced (and film buffs will be particularly annoyed by Hazanavicius’ attempt to invest unearned gravity into his story by stealing the score of a Hitchcock classic). And even though the film’s ultimate goal is to bring silent movies to a new audience, it ends up doing silent cinema a disservice by depicting it as rather simplistic (Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick was delightful, but his films were also whip-smart commentaries about the society he lived in).

It’s not a spoiler to say that The Artist ends with a dance number, and as fun as that closing scene is, it also unintentionally illustrates the film’s key problem. Right after the dancers have finished, sound breaks in and we hear the dancers breathing heavily. It’s a symbol of a film that always seems like it’s straining for your approval. It ultimately may earn it, but we see it sweating. Chaplin, Keaton, Astaire and Rogers – they made it look easy.

Mixed-martial-arts fighter Gina Carano, as you might expect, cannot really act. It’s a good thing that she doesn’t really have to in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire. Soderbergh’s action thriller is less interested in dramatic truth than in the truth of body slams, backflips, and broken noses. As a great philosopher once said, hips don’t lie – and neither do knees, elbows, feet, or fists.

There’s a plot to Haywire, involving a government assassin (Carano) double-crossed by one or several of her fellow cloak-and-dagger types (potentially including Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, and Channing Tatum). None of this, however, is particularly important (in case that kind of thing is a deal-breaker for you). The purpose of this film, as with the no-budget Asian martial arts pictures it often resembles, is to present a catalog of the preternatural talents of its star: she runs! she wall-kicks and somersaults! she crushes a man’s windpipe between her toned thighs!

Carano does all her own stunts here, which leads to fight scenes with the kind of fakery-free visceral brutality rare to CGI-airbrushed modern cinema (her hotel-room fight with Fassbender is one for the ages). That’s impressive enough, as is the fact that she quite credibly dismantles men that are twice her size, but the reason that Carano is a star to watch in the future is her arresting stage presence (even if I doubt that she’d be very good at emoting – I suspect that vulnerability, for example, is a relatively foreign concept for her). She’s incredibly intimidating in this film, and not just because of her physical strength – muscleheads are a dime a doped-up dozen – but because she seems to have a special kind of fighter’s intelligence. She’s less a brute-force Mike Tyson than a quick-thinking Muhammad Ali – when she moves and strikes, you sense her strategizing and probing for weakness on the fly, an abiding thoughtfulness behind her every move.

If there’s any man in this film that she does have trouble with, it’s Steven Soderbergh. Haywire seems like a reaction to the jittery Bourne-style aesthetic so dominant in modern Hollywood – Soderbergh instead opts for long, still shots of his heroine’s acrobatics. In action and chase scenes, this works extremely well – it allows for a full appreciation of the intricate fight choreography involved and also sets up some nice jolts that are a result of our trapped perspective (like an unexpected intrusion into our heroine’s car during a chase).

But the stillness extends through to the rest of the movie too – there’s a dead-air quality to the obligatory plot explanations and arty pauses between the film’s adrenaline shots. With the other actors, it seems like Soderbergh is reluctantly fulfilling his obligation to give the major movie stars something to do, when all he really wants is to have Ms. Carano fling them into the nearest available metal surface. (You wonder what caused Soderbergh’s recent vendetta with movie stars – you may recall that in last year’s Contagion, he not only kills off Gwyneth Paltrow with a super-virus within the film’s first ten minutes, but also gives her a loving close-up as doctors bore into her skull during the autopsy). Still, awkward pacing can’t sink a star turn this impressive, and I hope Ms. Carano has a long career of beating up assorted famous people ahead of her.

I Am the Fat Kid in Georgia
Troubling Anti-Obesity Campaign
by Emily Ho Sandford

I tend to not be a controversial person. I stay pretty neutral on a lot of topics because I like to be well versed in both sides before forming an opinion. That being said, the controversy this week regarding the Strong4Life campaign that is currently running in Georgia has really hit home. The campaign is sponsored by Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and is billed as childhood obesity campaign. According to Strong 4 Life, “50 percent of people surveyed did not recognize childhood obesity as a problem and 75 percent of parents with overweight or obese kids did not see their children as having a weight issue.”

Georgia has the second-highest childhood obesity rate in the country.  To bring this closer to home, according to the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Kentucky comes in right behind at number three.

In this campaign, overweight children appear in grim black-and-white images and on videos. One of the children, Tina, appears in a video somberly saying: “I don’t like going to school, because all the other kids pick on me. It hurts my feelings.” The tag line reads, “Being fat takes the fun out of being a kid.”

I WAS that girl.

I was born in Augusta, Georgia, and lived there until I was about 12. I was always big. ALWAYS. Always taller, always plumper. My round face, cheeks, and belly rarely escaped a photo. I think I had cellulite when I was 12. Appearances aside, however, I was as active as a child could be. Nearly every day after school I had jazz class, tennis practice, swim practice (was on an all-year league), and Brownies (the Girl Scout, not the food). My mom cooked everything at home, and it was pretty standard fare: baked chicken, broccoli, and rice. Sometimes my dad would cook stir-fry. We didn’t have junk in the house, and didn’t drink soda. I took my lunch to school most days, with a Thermos full of soup and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. If I was lucky, I’d get a pudding snack pack.

The difference between Tina and me? I WAS that girl, but I didn’t know it.

This girl in the video will always know that something was so “wrong” with her that she was in an ad for it. She will forever be a poster child for childhood obesity. What parent would sign up for their child to be that?

The one thing you can never get back in life is your innocence. Children are born unaware of hate, societal pressures, social norms, and unrealistic expectations. They only know love for their caregiver. As soon as people start pointing out differences, the innocence is lost. I distinctly remember when I realized that my dad was Chinese and my mom was white – they were different. I was about 8 years old and another Asian child at school said something about me having an Asian last name and Asian parent, but not looking like it. I was gobsmacked. Really? I’m half Chinese?

By no means am I saying that childhood obesity should remain unaddressed. I wish I had a solution for it, because I’d run around shouting it from the rooftops. As a formerly obese child, however, I have no idea what my parents could have done differently to instill different habits that would have made me smaller. I was extremely active, wasn’t eating junk, and had home cooked meals. My sister did the same things as I did and was always tiny. It’s just how it is. Don’t make me the poster child for poor health and poor food choices made by parents – that is 100% not the case.

This girl, and the others in the campaign, will have an entire life of knowing how different they are, and how wrong “society” thinks it is. I was 14 when I started contemplating suicide over my appearance. I am so thankful that I was old enough at that time to reach out to someone for help. Thinking about a child any younger than that and the pressure, scrutiny, and shaming they might endure makes my heart ache. Instead of putting this $50 million media spend on the air and on, put it behind political change that will get healthy lunches in schools, and reinstate PE and recess to all children.

One day I hope there will be a solution to childhood obesity. Until then, let’s focus on promoting healthy living no matter what the child’s appearance.

Emily Ho Sandford is Lexington-based weight loss blogger behind Skinny Emmie (http://skinnyemmie.com), where she journals her experiences on the way from unhealthy to fit. She was recently named one of the top 5 inspirational “tweeps” on Twitter (@skinnyemmie), and was featured on Shape Magazine’s website showcasing her 113 pound weight loss.

This article also appears on page 5 of the January 12 print edition of the annual Ace Weekly Health and Wellness issue.

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Lex Run Ladies: Lexington’s Resolution Runners Take on 2012

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LexRunLadies
Resolution Runners take on 2012

by Krissie Carr Bentley

I wanted to be a runner for years. I had such envy for the runners I would see across town gliding across the sidewalks. I wanted the wind in my hair. I wanted to see my surroundings in a new way. I wanted to feel the power of running.

It took me a long time to get there. It took two years for me to fall in love with running. I think a lot of that was because I was running by myself. I had my own schedule. No one knew if I cut my run short. No one knew if I walked up a hill I could have run. No one knew if I didn’t give it all I had.

I spend a lot of time on twitter and facebook. I saw so many of my virtual friends struggle with running. So many people wanted to run but had a hard time sticking to it or figuring out what they should do. I remember being stuck in that place. I remember wanting to want it, but letting the couch win. I wanted to help my friends.

In October of last year, I decided to start a running group. I didn’t want there to be any expectations at all. I wanted to be welcoming of everyone at all shapes, experience, and speeds. I wanted to involve women who were super fast and women who were just starting to walk for fitness. I wanted to provide the support to other women that I would have liked to have when I was struggling.

Just like that, LexRunLadies was born.

Over the past three months, we have met at various locations throughout Lexington. We’ve run on our own in groups as small as three and as large as twenty. We’ve run races. We’ve run with other running groups. We’ve volunteered at races. We are becoming what I had envisioned, but we’re getting there much quicker than I had hoped.

The LexRunLadies group provides structure. Our group runs were a little sporadic through the holiday season, but we have transitioned into a set schedule for runs. The runners and walkers who are training for longer distances come out for group runs on Saturday mornings in a variety of locations in Lexington and the surrounding area. Our Resolution Runners are meeting on Sunday afternoons and following Couch to 5K, a training program which uses running and walking intervals to get your body ready to run a 5K.

The group also provides support and accountability. LexRunLadies has grown because of social media. Twitter and facebook have been instrumental in getting information out and getting questions answered. We talk about injuries, recovery foods, and planned runs through twitter conversations and facebook posts. Accountability is a factor in sticking to a running schedule. If you say you’ll be at a run on facebook and don’t show up, someone will ask you about it. The community has become strong in a short amount of time because of the frequency with which we interact via social media. We encourage each other. We celebrate each other’s successes. And we also provide the firm “get your butt outside already!”

LexRunLadies is a group that truly meets everyone where they are. Our tagline is “for women who run, kinda run, or want to run.” I try very hard to live up to that. We welcome fast runners. We welcome runners who are learning to run. We welcome runners who are content to run long but not fast. We welcome injured runners who walk. And we welcome walkers who think they might want to become runners someday. We are most concerned with creating a community where everyone is welcomed where they are, but who want to become better and stronger because of the community.

I am so excited about the response to the Resolution Runners program. We are meeting on Sunday afternoons. The next group will begin on Sunday, January 15. We will meet behind the Liquor Barn in Hamburg and will run/walk the Brighton Rail Trail.

The training program is designed to prepare to you to run the Shamrock Shuffle 3K on March 17 and the Race to Read 5K on March 24. We will also have a graduation dinner at the Thai Orchid Cafe to celebrate. I am so thankful to be partnered with the Shamrock Shuffle, Race to Read, John’s Run/Walk Shop, the High Street YMCA, and Thai Orchid to present the Resolution Runners program.

The Resolution Runners Program is open to women and men of any fitness level who want to work toward running a 5K. Info, visit www.LexRunLadies.com or email LexRunLadies@gmail.com.

This article also appears on page 6 of the January 12 print edition of Ace Weekly’s Annual Health and Wellness Issue.

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Around the Bend in 2012
“2011 was the year my Doc told me I don’t have cancer any more”

by Robert Parks Johnson

Robert Parks Johnson: Before

In some ways, 2011 was a hard year, but even through the pain, we were blessed. We lost a lot of people we love, particularly our beloved brother Doug who fought cancer with such courage and faithfulness. Near the end of his battle, he spoke the words that just may go on my tombstone, “It’s all going to be worth it.” And so it is.

We lost our house in 2011, after a long game of chicken with Wells Fargo. The experience was sometimes painful, more often, it was just a pain, but we were blessed to have the support of our friend Donna, a realtor and a saint, (yes, it is possible.) I also have to thank the Judge who stood between us and the bank’s lawyers long enough for us to complete the short sale of the property. And most important of all, our brothers and sisters, Bob, Bobbie, and Paul, who helped us to find a new “place for our stuff.” We lost a house, but thanks to them, we were able to keep our home intact.

We traveled to Pennsylvania twice this fall. It was my first time home since I got sick, and I didn’t realize how much I missed the forests and hills of Western PA. My 30th college reunion was full of joy and tears with old friends Jeff, Joellen, Marcia, and Erin. So was my first, live Steeler game for which I am ever grateful to my old high school classmate, Skip. He gave me a day I will never forget, and can never repay. I got to taste Mum’s cooking again, to sleep in Gramma’s house, to hold my sisters in my arms, and to run the dirt roads we used to walk when I was a child.

2011 was the year the doc told me I didn’t have cancer any more.

I resolved to live the life we had all fought so hard to save. I croaked and strangled pretty girls in No Way to Treat a Lady, my first musical in years. Played a melancholy old queen in the world premier of Stephen Metcalf’s The Happy Hour. I returned to my beloved Actors’ Guild in Glengarry Glen Ross, and End Days. And I got to play in the park again, with a turn as William, Lord Hastings in Richard III. I got my first gig as an acting teacher at our community college, which I loved. I’ll act again in the spring, right after the marathon.

Robert Parks Johnson: After (at the Iron Horse Half, 2011)

Oh yeah, that. The Fat Man is running the Pittsburgh Marathon on May 6. The reality of it hasn’t quite set in, yet. I’m not sure it will until somewhere around mile 18 of the race. This time last year, I walked a mile and felt like I had won a gold medal. I ran a 3K in March, a couple of 5Ks in the Spring, then my first 10K on July 4. I got it into my head that I could finish a half-marathon, and in October, Mrs P cheered as I crossed the finish line. While I trained for that race, people contributed over $3500 to One for the Five, a project to honor fallen cancer fighters, and to raise money for the Markey Cancer Foundation. Soon, I’ll be launching two more projects, one to help Actors’ Guild, and one to help fund LIVESTRONG at the YMCA.

I never went to the YMCA when I was growing up. I was a Boy Scout. When I heard about a program at the Y to help cancer survivors improve their fitness, I jumped at it. I was expecting a free gym membership for three months. I got much more. The Y gave me what it has given so many people over the years: a place to exercise; a chance to meet friends; a way to discover a sense of purpose and value. I can say without shame or sentiment that I love the people I have met at  the Y. Love them so much that when my program was over, I went to the boss and asked for a job. For the first time in my life, I’m actually a little disappointed when I wake up and realize I have the day off.

What’s next?

I’m going to start studying to become a trainer at the Y. I’m going to run another half, and my first full marathon. I’ll be playing in a production of Camus’ Caligula this June. Mrs P and I are finally going to get rid of all the extra stuff we’ve been storing in boxes since we moved from Brooklyn.

So, in all sobriety I can say I’m the happiest  I’ve ever been. I love my wife more than ever. I have work that excites me. I have passion that makes me look forward to ten miles of asphalt on a chilly Bluegrass morning. I can’t stop thanking God for giving me this second (or third? or fourth? or umpteenth?) chance to live.

2011? It was a very good year. 2012? Gonna be even better.

This article also appears on page 8 of the January 12 print edition of Ace Weekly.

Kidney, Now!

Mother-Daughter prospective donor story took an unexpected turn

by Whitney Pannell

Many years ago, my mother suffered an allergic reaction to sulphur drug when she was 11 years old. Her doctor had been treating her flu with sulphur. She was hospitalized for three weeks and suffered from acute nephritis. Her doctor at the time said she would probably be affected by this later in life.

Thankfully, she lived her whole adult life with no kidney issues. Then two years ago, at the age of 73, her kidneys started to break down. She began seeing a nephrologist who monitored her kidneys. We were hopeful that her kidneys wouldn’t get any worse, but over the course of two years, their function decreased to 16 percent capacity.

I guess in my mind I had a hard time realizing that her heath was deteriorating and that her kidneys weren’t going to get better on their own. There were really only two options. Kidney transplant or dialysis. Her doctors referred her to The Transplant team at University of Cincinnati.

We traveled up there and met with their team and were told rather bluntly that she had two years to live unless she found a living kidney donor. In that moment of shock, I looked at my mother and the doctor and I said “I’ll donate my kidney!” I didn’t hesitate for a minute. After all, my mother is my best friend. While we were there they tested my blood to determine if I would be a match. A couple weeks passed, and the nurse from the hospital called and said I was a match. We were thrilled!

There were more tests that needed to be conducted, so we scheduled those and I went back up to Cincinnati for a full day of testing consisting of a CAT scan, EKG, echocardiogram, and numerous blood tests. Never in a million years did I think that my tests would turn out anything but normal. It truly never entered my mind that I wouldn’t pass with flying colors. Well, the tests proved me wrong. They called to tell me they had found a sizable tumor on my liver. To say I was shocked was an understatement. I am not even a drinker. I went through a whole range of emotions from disappointment, to fear.

Whitney picks up 2011 Ace Best of Lex Readers' Poll title

I wanted answers and I wanted answers now!

Thankfully, I have several good friends who are physicians and I was able to have the CAT scan films Fed Ex’d to them the  next day.Thankfully, none of them thought it appeared cancerous, but they felt like I needed to be evaluated by a liver specialist to make sure, and we were referred to one at UK. I immediately liked him; his warm; down to earth approach was a welcome relief from the doc in Cincinnati who bluntly told my mother she’d be dead in two years.

He advised me that he and his team of doctors had evaluated my films and

Whitney's surgery in progress

determined it to be a hepatic adenoma which in layman’s terms is a non cancerous tumor. It was too big to biopsy, and he said the risks associated with not removing it were that it could rupture or could become cancerous over time. After discussing it with my husband and my mother, I decided to go forward with the surgery to remove it. We were most impressed with the team of doctors and nurses at UK, and it’s convenient to have them here in Lexington, because the logistics of me going elsewhere and trying to juggle two children’s schedules would make it too difficult on everyone involved.

Whitney’s surgery was January 5, and the benign tumors were removed. Her mother still needs a Type A, or a Type O, kidney donor.

This article also appears on page 7 of the January 12, 2012 print edition of Ace.

This review appears on page 12 of the January 12 print edition of Ace.

by Raj Ranade

When a critic compares a movie to a video game, it’s usually a sign that he’s ticked off. That analogy generally refers to CGI onslaughts slapped together with all the finesse of a teenager on a Red Bull bender. This type of cinema couldn’t be more different from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a film of stately pace and quintessentially British restraint. But Tinker does resemble a video game in its own fascinating way – it’s a stimulating puzzle that demands your engagement, asking you to assemble blocks of plot into a comprehensible whole as more blocks rain down in a steady Tetris-style flow.

It’s an ingenious method of adaptation that director Tomas Alfredson has found here for John le Carré’s source novel. It took a BBC miniseries six hours to get through all the intricate details of this Cold War spy tale, which focuses on a retired intelligence agent returning to duty to hunt down a Russian mole placed at the top of Britain’s spy service. Alfredson here instead strips the story of the time-consuming exposition and hand-holding that audiences usually expect from a film, instead etching every plot detail in tossed-off bits of dialogue and loaded gestures between characters. This has the effect of making audiences feel more like spies than any more conventional rendering could – every image here must be interrogated for clues, every line of dialogue must be regarded with paranoid skepticism, and every time an actor appears on screen, it must be determined whether he’s delivering a performance or a performance-within-a-performance.

If this all sounds intimidating, well, it’s kind of meant to – compared to this film, the mystery in, say, David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a children’s rebus with an answer key. But the fun of this adaptation isn’t solely in the intellectual workout – even if you miss some of the plot’s more devious machinations, the film’s chilly atmosphere and anguished emotions come through loud and clear.

Alfredson’s last film was 2008′s Let the Right One In, the best vampire story in a decade saturated by them, and he brings his gift for generating dread to this very different tale. Tinker‘s spies are mostly office-bound paper-pushers (there’s even the requisite office Christmas party, this one even more awkward than yours) whose work just so happens to result in a slit throat every now and then. So menace arrives not in dramatic moments but in subtle ones – a character asserts his power over another by whistling a tune in a hallway, an ambush is given away by a single drop of sweat, our protagonist’s psychology is illustrated by the way he deals with a fly buzzing around inside the windows of a car.

Alfredson gets a lot of mileage out of these kinds of seemingly throwaway directorial moments, but he make sure the big dramatic revelations and betrayals come through just as effectively through his smart casting and direction of actors. The casting in Tinker uses the Harry Potter strategy of putting as many distinguished British character actors to work as possible. That results in a veritable hall of fame of “that guy” thespians, actors whose names you probably don’t know but whose faces you’ll recognize.

Best among these are Tom Hardy (recent winner of the Ace Weekly Award for Most Underrated Performance of 2011) and Gary Oldman. Hardy here plays an agent on the run after he unwittingly stumbles upon the existence of the mole and reveals his discovery to the wrong person – a bundle of fidgety hand gestures and nervous twitching, Hardy here seems to vibrate with the guilt of what his accidental admission has wrought.

Oldman’s protagonist, George Smiley, on the other hand, is Hardy’s polar opposite. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a film about men forced to repress their beliefs and desires into mental compartments as claustrophobic as Alfredson’s carefully-composed frames, and Oldman’s Smiley is the king of self-abnegation. In a performance of preternatural stillness, Oldman is the unlikeliest of badasses as a patient counterpuncher watching and waiting serenely for his moment to strike. Smiley has achieved a sort of triumph by the end of this film, but a somber closing montage (set to the mocking tune of a jaunty French pop cover) underlines the cost for everyone involved. “The future is female”, reads some prominently displayed graffiti outside a key safehouse towards the film’s end, and as the effects of this particularly male type of self-denial are illustrated, the viewer can’t help feeling thankful for that.

Gatewood with Willie Nelson, photo Ace Archives, by Peggy Blythe

Kentucky political icon Gatewood Galbraith died in his sleep overnight, according to news reports from Lexington television and newspapers.

Gatewood Galbraith

The perennial independent candidate for Kentucky’s governor, who  sometimes campaigned with the likes of Willie Nelson, at one point traveling in a hemp-oil fueled Mercedes, had stood again for the Commonwealth’s top post in the 2011 election that was won by Democrat Steve Beshear.

According to WKYT, the news was first posted on the Facebook page of his 2011 running mate, Dea Riley. Other news outlets reported that the death of the Lexingtonian was confirmed by the coroner.

Galbraith, who was an attorney, had owned a tractor company and done a variety of “On The Road” style jobs before entering politics as a candidate for Agriculture Commissioner in 1983. One notable plank of the Galbraith platform, no matter which office he was running for, was the legalization of hemp and the health benefits of marijuana.

In 1991, 1995 and 1999, he ran for governor, sometimes vying for the Democratic nomination, sometimes as a general ticket candidate. In 2000 and 2002, he ran for Congress. Read about his 2000 race from Ace Weekly coverage here.

In 2007, he again ran for governor.  His final race for governor, in the 2011 election that pitted Republican David Williams against incumbent Democrat Steve Beshear, saw him posting a respectable loss.

It can easily be argued that with more than 31 years on the ballot, Gatewood Galbraith’s name recognition, earned incrementally and through no- to low-cost campaigns, was higher statewide than that of many candidates who were successful in 2011.

In the 2011 Kentucky gubernatorial election, Galbraith received 8.99 percent of the vote statewide, or 74,860 votes. (That’s more than two times the 30,015 Iowa caucus ballots received by winner Mitt Romney in last night’s GOP Presidential Caucus.) In his home county of Fayette, which includes Lexington, Galbraith received 21.81 percent of the vote, or 13,131 votes.

State election finance records show that 2011 was Galbraith’s most expensive campaign — with $175,436 raised and nearly all of it spent.  In 1999, when he garnered nearly 15 percent of the statewide vote for governor, he spent only 34,830.  Finance records for two other statewide campaigns he ran state the amount raised and expended at $00.00.

A public memorial is scheduled for Thursday, January 12 at Lexington’s Carnegie Center.

A version of this post and additional essays appear on page 4 of the January 12 print edition of Ace Weekly.

by Raj Ranade

Movie direction is basically a process of seduction, and Jason Reitman has had a traditional tendency to come on too strong. Reitman’s past films (Juno, Up in the Air) have their share of fans, but there’s not an instant in either where you don’t sense a filmmaker behind the scenes desperate for audience approval – every uncomfortable moment in the teen pregnancy story Juno is quickly smoothed over with a dose of stylized quirk, and even Up in the Air‘s harsh corporate-downsizing drama is eventually melted into goo by endless snappy one-liners and the tasteful indie tunes omnipresent on the soundtrack.

So it’s natural to be nervous when Teenage Fanclub’s “The Concept” sparks up on Charlize Theron’s car stereo as she drives towards her hometown during the opening credits of Young Adult. At least, it is until Theron rewinds the song and starts it again. And again. Rather than a blithe mood-setter, this alt chestnut serves here as a token of obsession, the first indication that Reitman is up to something new in his latest film. And indeed, Young Adult may be Reitman’s best film, because where he was once content to offer up a balm to audiences, he’s now willing to jolt them into unsettlement and dismay along with the critical convulsions of humor.

That first drive home in Adult is inspired by an e-mail announcement Mavis (Theron) receives from an old boyfriend (Patrick Wilson). Mavis is a moderately successful children’s book ghost-writer living in the city, but the knowledge that her old beau has spawned a baby girl sends her frantically swimming upstream in an attempt to “rescue” this happily married man from his cage of domestic bliss and reclaim some shred of self-worth in the process.

Part of this futile homewrecking quest has to do with the “psychotic prom queen bitch” mindset that Mavis never grew past (and seeing as this is screenwriter Diablo Cody’s third high-school-obsessed movie, there must be at least some auto-critique here), but just as much has to do with her alcoholism, a topic that the film smartly underplays. Addiction on film tends to take the form of all-consuming destructive force (a la Requiem for a Dream) or as a character’s sole defining trait (as in upcoming sex-addiction drama Shame). Here, it’s presented in its less obvious but no less destructive form as a force that fuels bad decisions and toxic delusions even though it might leave sufferers largely untouched professionally and physically (except for her disheveled look immediately following late-night benders, Theron looks every bit a movie star here).

Most of Young Adult proceeds in a standard romantic-comedy structure laced with the strychnine of Theron’s vicious performance. For the most part, the movie doesn’t ask for much sympathy towards Mavis, rubbernecking instead at the spectacle of her one-woman train-wreck. Theron makes sure that the spectacle is an awe-inspiring one, creating a vision of thinly-veiled contempt forced occassionally into brittle smiles and backhanded praise (“It’s so inspiring to see a single mother that’s so confident on stage,” she tells a member of a local bar band). As she pursues the erstwhile jock and offends his wife, she also bonds over bourbon with a local nerd (Patton Oswalt, in the film’s most heartfelt performance) as damaged by high school as she was, albeit in a different way – he was crippled by jocks who incorrectly believed him to be gay.

Genre conventions point towards who Mavis will really end up with, but the strength of Young Adult‘s brilliant ending is that those conventions are simultaneously fulfilled and subverted. In the film’s final ten minutes, Reitman not only avoids the cheesy kind of redemption that most movies (like, for example, Up in the Air) would aim for, but he also obliterates the myth of idyllic small-town goodness that many movies (like, uh, Up in the Air) propagate, suggesting that unhealthy fantasies aren’t just in the domain of alcoholics. At the film’s close, our damaged heroine has had her delusions redoubled and thinks she has a new lease on life. The mordant joke of the film’s final shot – a headlight flickering briefly on the crushed front end of Mavis’ Mini Cooper – suggests otherwise.

Look at the photo collage. Find @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher). Look, as we say “catty-corner” (one up and to the left).

Yep, that’s Kentucky’s own Drew Curtis, just a little to the right and down from Matt Drudge.  Lexington’s fark.com CEO has been named to the “Top 25 Most Viral People On The Internet” list by the technology site Gizmodo. And that’s not to say he is in any way sick. Except for the sick way that he aggregates and distributes readers’ takes on news and headlines on his website, fark.com

Around Lexington, Curtis is the mild-mannered editorial presence of the site that makes sure that we, and millions of others, know the very latest and strangest local news from everywhere, and have the  opportunity to wryly comment on it, or say, Photoshop it.

Often featured in Ace  — including a 2002 coverstory, “Who’s Drew?”, and  a coverstory on Fark’s 10th anniversary, Curtis can sometimes quietly hold court at his favorite downtown pub, kick a soccer ball, be a dad.

On the streets of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, he’s recognized like Ms. Lohan on a topless bender: “Hey, it’s Drew Curtis!”

That’s because of the “Magic Touch” he and his site have on the Internet, reaching millions of people a day with sheer interesting, innovation that may or may not negatively affect worldwide corporate productivity.

Another Kentucky Proud export.

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Fark’s Drew Curtis on Tech Towns

Who’s Drew?