Juliana Hatfield Three - Become What You Are (1993)

Feminist Power Pop Rock from the 90's!

Juliana Hatfield Three’s 1993 album "Become What You Are" falls into the Alternative Nation / 120 Minutes marketing category (tip #1 to media empires: know your target audience) of the 90’s era. The style is "alternative power pop rock," or pop music with more of the belligerence and hard edge of rock, to which Hatfield adds her own take. The result is a lot like PJ Harvey & KD Lang - a woman vocalist/ musician who takes on the trappings of traditionally male-dominated rock music, and subverts them, exposing personal frailties using riffs and poses usually used to blow up imagined strengths.

Songs like the hit "Spin the Bottle" and "My Sister" are like glimpses into the private life of a unsettled young woman for whom every day is simply a struggle to survive on her own terms and to be acknowledged for herself. Respect as an individual is as important to Hatfield it seems. as songs like "Supermodel" and "A Dame With a Rod" attest - the message being that this is not just another pretty face, so you had damn well better not try to treat her like one, and it’d be a pretty good idea if you didn’t treat any woman like one, and an even better idea if every woman was willing to stand up for the respect she deserved. The very title of the album, “Become What You Are” is a call to action: recognize your self-worth, Hatfield says, and don’t let anything stop you from realizing your potential.

At the same time, she doesn’t lie and say that this is easy, but shows the personal demons against which she fights to become what she is. I don’t know what the "official" riot grrl take is on Hatfield -- whether she might be too pop or not -- but it seems to me like her record is right in line with their street-level feminist agenda, and perhaps even more accessible on a musical level. Hatfield’s voice is still a bit rough, but it works -- this isn’t meant to be polished pop, after all, and with the instrumentation around her voice, you hardly notice the minor flaws. This was probably one of the better records of the 1993 summer and strongly recommended.

Free Mp3 Download - 64.82 MB Single Zipped Folder – SendSpace Link

THIS IS A NON-COMMERCIAL FAN MIXTAPE. IF YOU LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR, PLEASE BUY THE ARTISTS ORIGINAL MUSIC. You can buy original CDS/DVDs & Mp3s at Emusic, Amazon, Itunes, other online stores or your nearest music retailer. Juliana Hatfield's official website is here!

Balls of the Rich & Famous

Not the Balls you Think!!

Twice or thrice a year I experience an extravagant taste of the kind of glamorous celebrity parties that will sweep any mortal soul off its feet. More when I travel abroad. I would be treacherous to my generous host if I tell you where I went or what I did but I can at least say that this party, almost an institution in swanky Singapore, underwent a transformation this year, after one of the regular big-time sponsors pulled out under rather acrimonious circumstances and a new online startup (flush with VC money) took its place.

Regarded as snobby by many of town’s rich and famous, who were put off by the increase of wannabe third-pagers who seemed to frequent the ball in years gone by, elbowing out all but the very persistent, this year's guest list reflected the kind of a refined cosmopolitan Singaporean diversity, though it was still, by its very nature, expat-centric. A guest near me quipped that the women looked far better than this time, as the previous sponsor seemed to favour outfits made from the curtains and bedsheets!!

My host was in some sort of velvety ball gown with back corset lacing and a rather shoddy tiara. She seemed to be in a fetid mood, perhaps due to the hassle of organizing the party, but more likely due to the fact that the ex-sponsor was present, at the invitation of some other VIP guest.

The MC at this affair – an Englishman obviously seemed disinterested. He should have been a star in his heydays but now he appeared like a shadow of his former self, in a new rainbow colored coat, which made him look a little bit like a circus clown. He was on a hectic schedule or so I was told – apparently he had just got back from some Film Festival in Europe, where he had supposedly chatted to Angelina Jolie or so he told.

I was sitting next to one hot brunette, who was so gorgeous one couldn't stop staring at those big star-like eyes and perfect playboy like features, balanced by a trademark wine-red dress which was an exercise in fashion excessiveness. Her husband (a spouty, balding Banker or Diplomat) started getting a little edgy when the whole table which consisted of (myself and my friend, his brunette wife, a Swedish expat and his pretty Eurasian partner, a friend of my host and a couple who had entered an online draw and won two tickets to the party) went on a champagne, vodka, rum, whisky (and other assorted concoctions) ordering spree.

We had nearly abandoned all hope of ever getting any drinks at all, let alone glasses, sitting at our lushly decorated table with its flowered centrepiece and mauve lampshade emblazoned with Mozart's countenance. We felt like some saints, surrounded by plenty but never managing to wet our parched lips. But once it did arrive, there was no stopping its flow. Pity the ever-smiling Bangladeshi waiter!

At the immediate neighboring table sat this pompous designer with his beautiful wife who must be a perfect model for his clothes. She was in a sheer lacy blouse with turned back cuffs and a full back and white 50s skirt.

I caught up with an old friend at the tantalizingly setup snack bar, which was just getting into party mood, after rejecting the grand waltzes of the main ballroom, where the Anglo-Indian songstress and her band were wooing the younger set with their tunes, even enticing them into a romantic dance, which worked out to be a cross between Zorba the Greek and a dance from hell.

I was chatting with him, thinking that the glitzy evening was going rather just fine, when the impossible began to happen. People started to leave - going home. "What's happening", my friend cried, as the rooms became more and more deserted and the prospect of leaving before 6 AM became ever more real.

It was around 3 AM, and we had a real disaster on our hands. The dreaded munchies had struck, and the dinner of 8 PM was fast becoming a memory (a few satays and chicken tikkas and a little caviar just don't count under these circumstances). It was time for radical measures.

We decided to hit the clinically clean streets of Singapore in search of a meal - not a very difficult task but we wanted a proper one. Fortunately there is one place the driver recommended in Clarke Quay, so up we cruised in the Toyota Fortuner to find a enormous queue.

Now there is nothing in the world that is cooler than hitting a great joint at 4 AM in formal suits & full ballgowns. It literally stops the traffic. "Wow, cool dress," said one of the bug-eyed revellers, waiting for their delivery, probably trying to take away the taste of too many Fosters.

We ordered their best pizza and when it came, it was delicious - satisfyingly big and generously topped with the best cheese I had ever had in recent times besides the price was a steal! A total antidote for a 5 star meal! You do learn something every day.

The Crucible (1996)

Arthur Miller's Solid Allegory of McCarthyism

The Crucible is a solid screen adaptation of Arthur Miller's 1953 play about the virulent Salem Witch trials (a take on the communist witch hunts in the 1940s-50s US), directed by Nicholas Hytner (The Madness of King George) and adapted by Miller himself for which he earned his only Oscar Nomination.

This is still obviously a play, but Miller makes concessions to cinema's need for speed, adding many exterior locations and keeping the action shifting constantly from one location to another to provide visual variety and heighten the tempo. He also dramatizes a few scenes hitherto summarized in dialogue, in particular the girls' forest revelry that instigates the plot; and some brief, newly devised scenes, such as a jailhouse send-off between Abigail and Proctor and a finishing execution scene.

It's a rather claustrophobic play on the stage, but the film opens things up and brings in some authentic New England atmosphere. The cast is strong throughout, although, maybe it's just me, but I don't quite accept Winona Ryder as the envious, devious Abigail. Her perfect roles seem to be those in which she can be spirited but essentially sweet and vulnerable, as she was in Little Women and Reality Bites.

Paul Scofield is an suitably hard-faced Judge Hathorne, Daniel Day-Lewis gives another dynamic performance as John Proctor, and Joan Allen, as Proctor's wife, proves herself a match for Day-Lewis. Allen's moving performance as Pat Nixon is the one good memory I have from Oliver Stone's headache-inducing kaleidoscope of a movie about Richard Nixon. Her performance in The Crucible is equally stunning. She looks every inch the Puritan wife - plain, stoic, reserved, full of suppressed emotion that pours forth in the climactic reunion with her husband. That scene between Day-Lewis and Allen, shot on a windy promontory against the background of the sea, is simply heartbreaking. It's worth the wait.

It's valuable to see a faithful screen version of this play noted for its allegory of McCarthyism, so younger generations who haven't seen it on stage will have a chance to experience it. Admittedly, this may not be the sort of film you'll return to on Saturday nights with popcorn in hand, but it's definitely worth watching once.

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Real Needs and Real Wants!!

A Schematic Food for Thought! Dig It!!

Hot Water Massage ?

Elusive Hot Showers & Other Watery Issues!!

Goes in, goes out, goes in, goes out!! It’s almost an hour and the house keeping guy is still trying to figure out what’s wrong with my bathroom shower!! It still trickles like a baby pee – not the rain shower I want!! And they don’t have a spare room to shift!! All this for a proper hot shower.

Well, I hate showers that have all the force and grit of a miserable drizzle. Yet, they seem to be the omnipresent thing, everywhere I go including my current room of misery in my supposedly ‘ubercool’ boutique hotel.

Are all the other people in the world afraid of water or something? What is with this glum dribble? (And don't start in with me about that "water shortage – save water” eco mantra, I am a ecoactivist myself but it's the middle of an extended freakin' cold country, here. Besides, this hotel doesn’t have buckets either!!) Heck, at some places I have been, where it rains more than it does here, you could get a better rinsing off standing outside in the rains than waiting for your hot shower to work.

You see there are two things I really want in a shower (well aside from a non-skid bath floor, branded toiletries and the occasional sexual fantasy): lots of very hot water and enough ‘massage’ pressure to force the shampoo out of my hair and the stinging pain out of my back. Is this a lot to ask? Apparently Yes.

I was in a hotel room in Singapore and there was a note on the bathroom mirror informing me that this room was supplied with low-consumption fixtures for my convenience. Whose convenience? Excuse me, but I do not find it convenient to wander about with my hair and skin sticky from an over moisturized soap I can't rinse out. Now, Singapore is mostly a well-manicured, sanitized city and is constantly whining about how they don't have enough water (and at the moment, enough electricity) and, despite the fact that I think the place is more full of pessimism than an overflowing septic tank, I'll grant them the smugness (sort of).

But, why is almost every other hotel I go full of showers that mostly spit, instead of spray? Do worn out travelers like to be sprinkled upon? I want the water to shoot (Hey, none of that, now, you dirty minds!)

This just ticks me off. If the problem is indeed the water supply, then send it though a smaller pipe. Even as kids we noticed that putting your thumb over the end of the garden hose made the water shoot out more forcefully. Put a figurative finger over the flippin' pipe and get me some be-damned pressure!

Even my club has showers which drool morbidly onto one's head (either they are apparently designed with very, very tall people in mind, the shower heads being a good 2.5 meters off the floor or the guy who designed it was on drugs).

Luckily, there is one place I can get a decent shower and, ironically enough, it's at my rickety Gym. Gyms are not noted for having great showers. Usually they are dark, dirty & cold and have limited hot water at very limited pressure. I mean, who really cares about a bunch of obese souls or transient body builders, right? But I got lucky. My Gym showers, though a bit dim, have plenty of hot water and it comes out of tiny shower heads at an adjustable pressure. Fantastic.

Not everyone is like me, I know, in that desire to have little hot water needles pounded into their flesh, so they can adjust the spray as they see fit, but me, I've got the thing adjusted to the hardest setting I can get and the hottest water I can stand (which is pretty hot). Boiling Egg temperature, you could say! When I step out of the shower, I want my skin to whine and steam, utterly clean and shrimp-pink. None of this apathetic oozing and mincing about, quivering. Blah!

A cold shower is nice in the summer (and necessary under certain conditions), but it's not in my fetish-collection. Maybe that's the problem: maybe people are just becoming too wimpy and too peculiar. Could it be that my fellow friends are actually in favor of this “no pressure’ deviation? Or maybe they even like it - along with squashy, over-soft mattresses? Ugh! I may have to declare myself a member of a separate nation: the land of hot showers, soft but firm beds, weird movies and lotsa shiny, happy people!.

When did we all become a world of green tea-sippin', wellness-spoutin' dribblers who can't even operate their mobile phones? I'm disgusted. In fact, I might have get the hell out of here, hit my gym, beat up on something for a while and then take a power packed massage shower. A hot one, that is!!

1000 Days of Blogging

Celebrating 3 Years of the Websnacker Blog

Yes, I know I only posted once in January and now it has been a month since that post. My second post this year and the whole world seems to have changed – my favorite file sharing site Megaupload is gone and so have all my cherished mp3 and video uploads (2400 and more) that were hosted on it. I don’t believe in the RIAA/MPAA shitty argument on piracy and I don’t make any money out of my uploads but do those greedy sharks in Armani coats ever care?

Anyway, with this post, I officially begin my 3rd year of publishing this spritely little blog for all you web wanderers. The response to Websnacker over the past 36-38 months has been nothing short of exceptional, from both the real world (folks I have met via my blog in real life) and the virtual readership of the online community worldwide, the 11000 readers of my James bondish newsletter and not to forget, my 23000 strong (and growing) Twitter followers and 4000 fans on my Facebook page!

I've struggled a little in 2011 and have had my own generous share of ups and downs – often times biting off more than I could proverbially chew. And, I’ll admit, I've been bad. I've been busy, have been a bit (or completely) inconsistent (whatever you deem fit) in my blogging schedule. I've been distracted by diverse projects at office and duties at home. I'm having some trouble in re-setting the markup here to do exactly what I want but on the other hand, my Sci-fi novel seems to be nearing the finish line. However, this is not an excuse for being languid. I'll try to get something up, here, a little more frequently.

At least, I guess, I still did manage to produce a handful of entertaining blogposts and with the support of all of you out there, my secret army of ghost writers and the music and cinema I cover, I look forward to another successful year blogging in 2012.

I have planned a profusion of surprises and enhancements in store for the current year. For a start, I will be moving to a custom domain – Websnacker Blog (cant trust Google anymore), will feature guest posts (anyone game?) and will also try to re-upload whatever stuff I can get my hands that was previously on Megaupload!

And as this blog continues to grow up and swell, my focus will continue remain on my first love – great music & awesome movies besides all the other things that you are pretty used to reading out here including those controversial agendas. So stay tuned...the fun has just begun.

Stop SOPA / PIPA - Save The Internet!!

And its time You did something about it!

If you hadn't heard of SOPA before, you probably have by now: Some of the internet's most influential sites—Reddit and Wikipedia among them— have gone dark to protest the much-maligned anti-piracy bill. But other than being a very bad thing, what is SOPA/PIPA? And what will it mean for you if it passes?

SOPA/PIPA is an anti-piracy bill working its way through Congress...

House Judiciary Committee Chair and Texas Republican Lamar Smith, along with 12 co-sponsors, introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act on October 26th of last year. Debate on H.R. 3261, as it's formally known, has consisted of one hearing on November 16th and a "mark-up period" on December 15th, which was designed to make the bill more agreeable to both parties. Its counterpart in the Senate is the Protect IP Act (S. 968). Also known by its cuter-but-still-deadly name: PIPA. There will likely be a vote on PIPA next Wednesday; SOPA discussions had been placed on hold but will resume in February of this year.

...that would grant content creators extraordinary power over the internet...

The beating heart of SOPA is the ability of intellectual property owners (read: movie studios and record labels) to effectively pull the plug on foreign sites against whom they have a copyright claim. If Warner Bros., for example, says that a site in Italy is torrenting a copy of The Dark Knight, the studio could demand that Google remove that site from its search results, that PayPal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull all ads and finances from it, and—most dangerously—that the site's ISP prevent people from even going there.

...which would go almost comedically unchecked...

Perhaps the most galling thing about SOPA in its original construction is that it let IP owners take these actions without a single court appearance or judicial sign-off. All it required was a single letter claiming a "good faith belief" that the target site has infringed on its content. Once Google or PayPal or whoever received the quarantine notice, they would have five days to either abide or to challenge the claim in court. Rights holders still have the power to request that kind of blockade, but in the most recent version of the bill the five day window has softened, and companies now would need the court's permission.

The language in SOPA implies that it's aimed squarely at foreign offenders; that's why it focuses on cutting off sources of funding and traffic (generally US-based) rather than directly attacking a targeted site (which is outside of US legal jurisdiction) directly. But that's just part of it.

...to the point of potentially creating an "Internet Blacklist"...

Here's the other thing: Payment processors or content providers like Visa or YouTube don't even need a letter shut off a site's resources. The bill's "vigilante" provision gives broad immunity to any provider who proactively shutters sites it considers to be infringers. Which means the MPAA just needs to publicize one list of infringing sites to get those sites blacklisted from the internet.

Potential for abuse is rampant. As Public Knowledge points out, Google could easily take it upon itself to delist every viral video site on the internet with a "good faith belief" that they're hosting copyrighted material. Leaving YouTube as the only major video portal. Comcast (an ISP) owns NBC (a content provider). Think they might have an interest in shuttering some rival domains? Under SOPA, they can do it without even asking for permission.

...while exacting a huge cost from nearly every site you use daily...

SOPA also includes an "anti-circumvention" clause, which holds that telling people how to work around SOPA is nearly as bad as violating its main provisions. In other words: if your status update links to The Pirate Bay, Facebook would be legally obligated to remove it. Ditto tweets, YouTube videos, Tumblr or WordPress posts, or sites indexed by Google. And if Google, Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook, etc. let it stand? They face a government "enjoinment." They could and would be shut down.

The resources it would take to self-police are monumental for established companies, and unattainable for start-ups. SOPA would censor every online social outlet you have, and prevent new ones from emerging.

...and potentially disappearing your entire digital life...

The party line on SOPA is that it only affects seedy off-shore torrent sites. That's false. As the big legal brains at Bricoleur point out, the potential collateral damage is huge. And it's you. Because while Facebook and Twitter have the financial wherewithal to stave off anti-circumvention shut down notices, the smaller sites you use to store your photos, your videos, and your thoughts may not. If the government decides any part of that site infringes on copyright and proves it in court? Poof. Your digital life is gone, and you can't get it back.

...while still managing to be both unnecessary and ineffective...

What's saddest about SOPA is that it's pointless on two fronts. In the US, the MPAA, and RIAA already have the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to request that infringing material be taken down. We've all seen enough "video removed" messages to know that it works just fine.

As for the foreign operators, you might as well be throwing darts at a tse-tse fly. The poster child of overseas torrenting, Pirate Bay, has made it perfectly clear that they're not frightened in the least. And why should they be? Its proprietors have successfully evaded any technological attempt to shut them down so far. Its advertising partners aren't US-based, so they can't be choked out. But more important than Pirate Bay itself is the idea of Pirate Bay, and the hundreds or thousands of sites like it, as populous and resilient as mushrooms in a marsh. Forget the question of should SOPA succeed. It's incredibly unlikely that it could. At least at its stated goals.

...but stands a shockingly good chance of passing...

SOPA is, objectively, an unfeasible trainwreck of a bill, one that willfully misunderstands the nature of the internet and portends huge financial and cultural losses. The White House has come out strongly against it. As have hundreds of venture capitalists and dozens of the men and women who helped build the internet in the first place. In spite of all this, companies have already spent a lot of money pushing SOPA, and it remains popular in the House of Representatives.

That mark-up period on December 15th, the one that was supposed to transform the bill into something more manageable? Useless. Twenty sanity-fueled amendments were flat-out rejected. And while the bill's most controversial provision—mandatory DNS filtering—was thankfully taken off the table recently, in practice internet providers would almost certainly still use DNS as a tool to shut an accused site down.

...unless we do something about it.

The momentum behind the anti-SOPA movement has been slow to build, but we're finally at a saturation point. Wikipedia, BoingBoing, WordPress, TwitPic: they have all gone dark on January 18th. The list of companies supporting SOPA is long but shrinking, thanks in no small part to the emails and phone calls they've received in the last few months.

So keep calling. Keep emailing. Sign petitions! Most of all, keep making it known that the internet was built on the same principles of freedom that this country was. It should be afforded to the same rights.

This article written by Brian Barrett appeared originally on Gizmodo! It has been reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License! Thanks to Gawker Media!!

Waking Life (2001)

Richard Linklater's Brilliant Animated MindTripper!!

Waking Life (2001) is a dazzling mess. There are probably more ideas generated in those 100 minutes than in all other movies currently playing around town combined, even if its over 10 years old. Richard Linklater's film is presented as one long hallucination by its nameless central character, an observer of conversations about existentialism, rebirth, free will, bereavement, warfare, technology, faith and, most of all, the nature of dreams themselves.

Like virtually any work that dares to ask big, unanswerable questions, Waking Life can be pretentious and even exhausting but you also get euphoria from its unquenchable curiosity about the world, like a skyfall.

As in Slacker (1991), Linklater's first film, there is virtually no conformist story, making it easy to lose yourself along the way. The imprecise rotoscoped animation only enhances the feeling of displacement but that's specifically the point. In other words, getting lost with Linklater is a lot more enlightening than being spoon-fed, hand-led and patronized by a lot of garden-variety filmmakers more concerned with filling the theater than filling your brain.

Brimming with references to Jean-Paul Sartre, D.H. Lawrence and countless others, Waking Life is at times encumbered by its assault of ideas; still, it stands in direct hostility to an entertainment culture where being "about nothing" is a insignia of respect.

Sure, it'd be nice if people in this movie occasionally just talked about baseball or the weather to balance things out. There's also no denying that some of the images in Waking Life are breathtaking but at length, many might feel that this is an agonizing exercise in hedonistic, snotty filmmaking, that will ignite arguments over its apparent intrinsic worth and, no doubt, be touted by some as a masterpiece.

Nonetheless, Waking Life sticks with you in a insightful way, its ideas buzzing through your mind like fireflies. And I was beginning to think the sheer possibility was but a dream.

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The Original Nirvana!

Still Smells Like Teen Spirit After All These Years!

These are busy days – insanely busy days but I have had Nirvana for company all through last week. Dunno why but Kurt Cobain has been a savior of sorts for me – first during my school, then my confused college days and now in my work life.

And the impact of one particularly magnetic song can never be undervalued. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" blasted out of the TV screen in 1991 and literally changed the entire world of music. As my friends and I listened to that song, none of us could really explain exactly why it moved us like it did. The lyrics were hard to recognize. The music was grandiloquent and powerful, but it really wasn't all that world-shattering to anyone already familiar with the Stone Temple Pilots, Alice in Chains, Jane's Addiction, Pearl Jam and others like them.

Still, we were drawn to that song. We took that song, and its struggle to describe the indescribable, and made it mean something more. We wrote into that song all of our own feelings that we just couldn't put into words. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" perfectly captured an angry artist questioning his life and circumstances. It was a song that wanted to ask the big questions but knew that doing so was pointless. The song defined a generation and a decade like few songs before it. Even now, after so many years since its release, I have a hard time explaining exactly what it meant to me.

Like so many other people my age, I eventually became a huge fan of Nirvana. I collected their import singles, tracked down hard-to-find indie releases, traded tapes of shows, and read everything about the band that I could get my hands on. I never saw them in concert though. Maybe I was not lucky enough. I also doubt if I could have endured seeing a crowd full of drunk frat boys singing along with "Come As you Are" or "Sliver."

It's easy to be jaded about the whole thing now, as I look back on how ridiculous things became. Flannel became fashionable, "Grunge" entered popular vocabulary, every half-assed band from Seattle got a record deal, heroin made a comeback, and everything on the radio and MTV or VH1 started sounding a heckuva lot like Nirvana. The copycats all got the basic sound right, they just couldn't add any real emotion or impact. Nirvana was the genuine article, and their music mattered so much more than anyone else's at the time. And that’s what still matters!

Youtube Video Link here!

Fly Away Home (1996)

An Outstanding Family Classic from the 90s

Hollywood may be a moral wasteland, the epicenter of cultural corruption, a modern-day Gomorrah driven by vanity and venality—but what the heck, it sure cranks out some nice movies (as it did in the 90s – 1996 to be specific).

Fly Away Home (1996) not only reminded that good movies still happen, but, following as it did on the heels of so many fine children's films, it makes me wonder if the early 1990s weren't the richest period ever for family movies.

In 1995, we saw the charming talking-pig movie Babe and the funny, innovative Toy Story. In 1994, there was the magical Secret of Roan Inish from John Sayles, and Gillian Armstrong's remake of Little Women with Winona Ryder—the finest version ever of the Louisa May Alcott warhorse and one of the best films of that year. Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden and A Little Princess were given visually sumptuous adaptations, the first in 1993 and the other in 1995.

Disney, of course, still releases a major animated film each summer; although it’s recent efforts strike me as more tasteless. And these are just the cream of the crop. Add to those all the satisfying bread-and-butter and also fantastic kiddy films that come out every year, like Kungfu Panda, Smurfs, Rango, Cars, Hugo, Up or the more recent Adventures of Tintin, and we're talking profusion here. For this reason, I don't buy the argument that Hollywood has deserted family or moral values.

If you haven't seen Fly Away Home yet, I heartily recommend it. This tale of a Canadian girl who raises a flock of orphan geese is the kind of family film that functions on an adult level, so don't pass it up just because you don't have kids. At the risk of trashing my hard-earned standing as a killjoy, I have to say that I found the whole experience to be cheering and even inspiring.

The film is directed with complete self-assurance by Carroll Ballard, who, by my count, has directed only 6 previous efforts in the past 30 years. I skipped his Nutcracker (1986), but I enjoyed his other works: The Black Stallion (1979), Never Cry Wolf (1984), Wind (1991) and the superb african adventure Duma (2005).

Each is memorable for its natural scenery perhaps the decisive factor Ballard uses to choose his sporadic projects. One thinks of the magnificent coastline vistas in The Black Stallion, the breathtaking Arctic wilderness in Never Cry Wolf, the seascapes and desert country in Wind. For Fly Away Home, Ballard reteamed with Caleb Deschanel, his Black Stallion cinematographer, and their collaboration has made this film another rich visual experience. From macro photography of hatching eggs to funny ground-level tracking shots of goslings to dramatic aerial views of autumn landscapes in Ontario, this film offers constant visual diversity and some gorgeous imagery.

Composer Mark Isham, whose synthesizer-heavy soundtrack enhanced the otherworldly strangeness of the northern wilderness in Never Cry Wolf, contributes a traditional and enjoyable score to Fly Away Home. Fine performances come from Anna Paquin in the lead and Jeff Daniels as her father. And a special tip of the hat to the special effects team, who, through state-of-the-art composting and digital animation, create the illusion that we're flying alongside a flock of geese.

I find it fulfilling to see a film in which quality special effects are smoothly integrated to support a good story, as opposed to an adrenalized concoctions like Transformers (2007) or Twister (1996) where the effects become the film's raison d’être. This movie simply would not have worked if filmed before the 1990s or now in 2000s, because the crucial flying scenes would not have been convincing. In a time when we can expect to be swamped with films built around the new digital technology, Fly Away Home proved that you could put the digital tools to the right use without superseding the movie’s soul. Highly recommended.

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