Things I've Enjoyed This Week

* "No Role Modelz" by J. Cole
* Isa Chandra Moskovitz's Best Pumpkin Muffins recipe
* Porco Rosso directed by Hiyao Miyazaki
* "There Was an Old Dragon Who Swallowed a Knight" by Penny Parker Klostermann
* The HBO miniseries "Olive Kitteridge"
* 30-Minute Tuscan White Bean Soup recipe on Serious Eats
* The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

Water

Deepa Mehta's Oscar-nominated film Water tells the tragic story of widowed women in India. According to her faith's Holy Scriptures, a Hindu wife has three options when her husband dies: she can kill herself, marry her husband's younger brother, or live in isolation.

The widows in the story live as social outcasts in an ashram, either by choice or coercion, dependent on alms (and, as the audience learns later, prostitution) for their rent and food.

When one of the shamed widows takes her own life, a deeply religious widow named Shakuntala begins to question the morality of her religion's doctrine. She takes an exploited young widow away from the ashram to see Gandhi speak. The Great Spirit -- a champion of India's oppressed widows and Untouchables -- states "For several years, I believed that God is truth; but now I have realized that Truth is God."

Gandhi's speech erases the moral doubt of the widow (and the audience). The message is clear: we should treat every person humanely, even if it means defying our society's most sacred institutions. In the touching final scene, Shakuntala tries to save her young companion from the hardship of a widow's life, by giving her away.

Studio DDT

DDT is the studio that creates the wonderfully bizarre special effects in Guillermo del Toro's movies Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone. I can't wait to see del Toro's latest, Hellboy II.

Wall-E Origami

Brian Chan has designed an original origami of Wall-E for Geekologie. See more pics of Wall-E (and Iron Man) here.

Learn From Laurence Fishburne

"You're the prince. You're the prince and I'm the king."

Ben Kingsley on Adolescence

"I think youth has become very tangled up with consumerism. And I think the very extraordinary years that we call adolescence, moving from childhood to adulthood, they're very fleeting. And, I don't recall my adolescence being so consumer driven, so constantly invaded by peer pressure, fashion, gossip, uhhh very transient musical fashions and tastes, clothes, uh umm role models. It seems to be very cluttered, and adolescence is hard enough without a whole multibillion dollar consumer industry jumping on the backs of adolescence and making them, and squeezing them, squeezing dollars out of them. Well in fact, the reverse should be happening, that we should as an adult society, be squeezing encouragement into them and decent values into them and beautiful thoughts and ideas into them. No, we just want their money. It's pathetic, and I think somewhere in this story and in the dynamic, in the essentials of adolescence being a necessary time for experiment...But at the heart of it is, in order to grow, you have to make mistakes, you must be reckless, you cannot follow the herd, you have to follow your heart, you have to, to quote my crazy character, end up face down in the gutter, get your heart broken, make a mess of things because that is what adolescence is. And it's self healing. We make a mess as adolescents and it's self healing. Unless of course we stray into narcotics which will kill us or into alcohol which will kill us or into any kind of very compulsive destructive behavior but we are constantly, adolescents are constantly invited to be constant consumers. So it's a little unfair to expect adolescents to be free of certain substances, eating disorders, drug disorders, alcohol disorders and at the same time say but you do have to consume. It's very unfair of them, you know."

Watch the video of Ben Kingsley on the June 17, 2008 taping of the Tavis Smiley Show here.

Watch the trailer for Ben Kingsley's new movie The Wackness here.

Watch an example of rampant childhood consumerism here.

Entertaining Review of the Incredible Hulk

Movie review of the Hulk. Written in the voice of the Hulk himself. Review funny. Movie not. Read here.

Drugstore Cowboy

I saw Drugstore Cowboy last night, a 1989 film directed by Gus Van Sant. It's about a crew of drug addicts who rob drugstores to feed their addiction for dope. I was impressed with many elements of the movie and particularly struck by the character of the protagonist, Bob.

Bob is the undisputed ringleader of his crew, a lifelong junkie who has spent his entire life trying to get high. His need for a steady diet of dope has led him to a life of crime, and he's found himself down a path where he will be spending the rest of his life on the lam or in prison.

Despite this bleak future, Bob is an admirable character -- he is strong, handsome, smart, principled and caring. He just has one fatal flaw -- his hopeless addiction to drugs -- and that one flaw has set him upon a path for destruction.

Bob is the quintessential tragic character -- a person built for a life of glory, success, and honor, brought down by his Achilles heel.

I can't help but reflect on my own life and those of my friends, family, and students, and worry that we may suffer from the same fate. My Achilles heel? A lack of discipline -- an overt distaste for the mundane, an inability to persist and follow commitments through to the end. This flaw, unfortunately, extends in both my professional and personal life, and I worry that it may be my undoing.