Monday, March 15, 2010

2nd race weekend

Read about the rise and fall of my ego, here.

Monday, March 8, 2010


This is a post I submitted to the Columbia Cycling blog:

(The picture above shows the sprint finish at the end of my first race. I'm in the center, in blue.)

This past weekend, at Rutgers, I raced a bike for the first time. For me personally, there was a lot riding--yes of course the pun is intended--on these couple of races. And it was more than being able to tell people that I didn't shave my legs for nothing. Over the past couple of months I've invested a lot of time and energy in this thing. It probably wasn't much compared to what more serious cyclists do, but for me, it was a lot. And besides the actual training, I had made bike racing one of my main things. I told my friends about the training, and how much I cared about it; I told myself I cared a lot about it; I gave up other activities to make time. And what's more important than your time?

So I was naturally anxious about the answers this weekend would provide to some of the questions I'd had for months: would I enjoy racing as much as I predicted I would? would I do well enough to justify all my training? and what the hell is a crit, anyway?

Well, I got my answers all right. To sum up, racing bikes is just about the funnest thing I've ever done. Ever. Sure, it helped that I did well, but the main thing was the feeling of being in the pack, going over twenty miles per hour, my senses heightened and my focus laser-sharp. Everything happens so quickly. At one point during the crit, there was a crash right in front of me. It took everything I had to avoid it and stay on my bike. But after narrowly escaping the crash by going off-road into the dirt for a few seconds, and sprinting to catch back up with the field, I found myself smiling. Because that's what it's all about--the high stakes; the danger at every corner; and the rush of getting out alive. All I can say is, I can't wait for the next race.

Monday, March 1, 2010

Shutter Island review


What is reality? Am I crazy? Did I just soil myself? Are Leo Dicaprio's eyes really that blue?

These were just some of the questions going through my head after Shutter Island ended. You know how you felt after watching The Matrix for the first time? For a little while you really didn't know if you were living in the dream world or the real world? I got a good dose of that disorientation--not quite as pungent or long-lasting as from the Matrix, but still plenty powerful--from the new Scorsese flick. The acuteness of this disorientation is the most successful part of this movie, and it's ultimately what saves it and keeps it buoyant despite its flaws.


Yes, as surely as Shaun White is a lovable ginger, this movie has its flaws. This makes it vulnerable, and some took this opportunity and unfairly demolished it. (Yeah, I'm lookin' at you, gAy.O. Scott.) The weirdest of the weird in this one, are the super intense flashbacks to German concentration camps, which have all the gruesomeness of Sophie's Choice, but none of the relevance. These occur in Teddy Daniels' (Dicaprio) daydreams (as a solider in WWII, Daniels was one of the first Allied soldiers to find Dachau) and have no coherent link to the overall narrative, except to accentuate Daniels' troubled past. But this story line is overkill: Daniels already has a recently deceased wife (Michelle Williams) to reckon with--this by itself is plenty to justify his moodiness. It's like saying Lebron James and Dwayne Wade will win the Knicks a championship next year, when we know Lebron James will bring New York a trophy plenty easy by himself. Also, it's not like the movie needs any more help in the spookiness department from the piles of dead Jews.

Most unfortunately, the Nazi thing broadens the movie's scope in an irritating way, and comes off as kind of pathetic attempt by an egotistic director to make his movie more important than it needed to be. This has the indirect result of making all the other attempts at transcending the narrative seem contrived; for example, the warden's monologue near the end about violence is wonderfully dark and poetic, but it's sort of annoying in the context of the Nazi hubris.

There are some other minor moments which are pretty bizarre--the kind where everyone shakes their head and says, "what the balls was he thinking?" What, not everyone says that? Like, in one of Daniels' daydreams, a kid who is clearly dead wakes up and starts repeating, "I'm dead." The audience started laughing at that one.

Other things I didn't like about it:
1) Michelle Williams. (Her acting was much better in Dawson's Creek.)
2) The score. (Some parts were so over-the-top, it made me think of Jason Segel's character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall making fun of how he composed "ominous tones.")
3) Leo using the same exact accent he did in The Departed.
4) The giggling idiots sitting next to me who were a little too pleased with their late 20s/early 30s selves for bringing booze into the theater. I haven't seen anyone that proud of themselves for sneaking alcohol into the movies since me, when I was in 9th grade.

Where Scorsese earns his bread though, is with the skillfully woven plot. The ending, while not as slap-in-the-face surprising as, say, the twist in The Sixth Sense, is deliciously good, and leaves you kicking yourself for not figuring it out sooner. So, if you want to be pretty scared, see Leonardo Dicaprio act really well, laugh at some moments that aren't meant to be funny, and get whacked in the face with a cool ending, then go see Shutter Island.