Heights is a bit offbeat for a Merchant-Ivory production, but it's perfectly in the mainstream of contemporary urban ensemble dramas. Directed by Chris Terrio from an Amy Fox script (to which Terrio contributed), it features such un-Ivoryesque elements as a handheld camera, split screens, and a gritty audio track that is sometimes downright unintelligible.

Nevertheless, as the film follows a group of New Yorkers through a day and a night and a morning, it hews to traditional story-telling values, with an emphasis on clearly phrased performances from its actors. (Heights is good for juicy cameos and supporting bits from Michael Murphy, Isabella Rossellini, Eric Bogosian, and George Segal.) And the events of the movie spiral inward towards the evening's party hosted by stage actor Diana Lee (Glenn Close)—a structural element suggestive of Austen and Woolf.

Fox and Terrio place at least half a dozen scenes on the rooftops and terraces of Manhattan, for it is from there that the movie's characters look down on what they once had, or look out to what they have yet to achieve.

posted: 9:10:01 PM  

200 ways to code a "Hello, world" program.

(Thanks to robot wisdom.)

posted: 1:32:57 PM  

Next quiz question: who is the Whitehurst Freeway named for? (No points for quibbling that it's really a long approach ramp for the Key Bridge.)

posted: 9:32:20 AM