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Neil Jordan's Seven Grim Fairy Tales: An Infographic Guide to a Director's Obsessions

This piece is about director Neil Jordan's seven most overtly supernatural, fairy tale-like films—The Company of Wolves, High Spirits, Interview with the Vampire, The Butcher Boy, In Dreams, Ondine, and his latest, the mother-daughter vampire shocker Byzantium. An infographic analysis of each—please refer to the key for each symbol's meaning—reveals this pattern and confirms Byzantium is the culmination of 30+ years of Jordan exorcising his personal demons on-screen.

May contain spoilers

Ebert Club

#117 May 30, 2012

Marie writes: Recently, a fellow artist and friend sent me the following photos featuring amazing glass mosaics. She didn't know who the artists were however - and which set me off on a journey to find out!  I confess, the stairs currently continue to thwart me and thus remain a mystery, but I did uncover who created the "glass bottle doorway" and was surprised to learn both its location and the inspiration behind it. (click image.)

Scanners

The naked truth about Airport Security Theater

"it's easier to put on slippers than to carpet the whole world." -- Stuart Smalley

My Theory of Everything (regarding human behavior) centers on our species' poor understanding of risk assessment and management.* Which is probably why I found this NY Times op-ed, "A Waste of Time and Money," by "security technologist" Bruce Schneier, so very refreshing after all the pre-Thanksgiving junk-touching hysteria. Remember that? It seems to have evaporated over the weekend, but there are still lessons to be learned. So, let's get right to Schneier's point:

A short history of airport security: We screen for guns and bombs, so the terrorists use box cutters. We confiscate box cutters and corkscrews, so they put explosives in their sneakers. We screen footwear, so they try to use liquids. We confiscate liquids, so they put PETN bombs in their underwear. We roll out full-body scanners, even though they wouldn't have caught the Underwear Bomber, so they put a bomb in a printer cartridge. We ban printer cartridges over 16 ounces -- the level of magical thinking here is amazing -- and they're going to do something else.

This is a stupid game, and we should stop playing it.

It's not even a fair game. It's not that the terrorist picks an attack and we pick a defense, and we see who wins. It's that we pick a defense, and then the terrorists look at our defense and pick an attack designed to get around it. Our security measures only work if we happen to guess the plot correctly. If we get it wrong, we've wasted our money. This isn't security; it's security theater.

Movie Answer Man

Stark beauty, dark vision

Q. In your review for "The Dark Knight," you say that the Joker is a product of his father's poor treatment, but that's just one story he uses to explain his scars. Another is that he did it for his wife, and Batman interrupts before he offers a -- most likely -- different story. I think the point was that he doesn't have a cause. Who's wrong here?