MEDIA MONDAY
What have you been reading, listening to, watching?

Weekend Box Office
1.Hancock
2.Wall-E
3.Wanted
4.Get Smart
5.Kung Fu Panda

Doc Watch
I saw 3 a couple of weeks ago.

Note by Note is a beautiful, fascinating look inside the Steinway & Sons piano factory in New York. It follows a single concert grand, starting as a long piece of wood from an Alaskan lumberyard through the year-long process it takes to make it a finished Steinway. The clear highlight is meeting the people who work with such obvious pride and skill at their jobs, which are shockingly un-automated.

My Name is Albert Ayler uses lots of first-person speaking from the subject himself to explore the music and psyche of one of my (anti-)heroes. Some of the footage is astounding - I had never actually seen film of him playing before - and the audio is revealing. I learned lots about him I didn't know, but still I have to say, I was a bit disappointed in the film.

Standard Operating Procedure is Errol Morris' new film, about the Abu Ghraib scandal. It's another haunting work by him, wrenching and powerful and so very disturbing. Somehow, he managed to make an entire film about the public characters of the scandal and still leave the impression that the subject of the story should be not those in the pictures, but those never pictured, whose actions remain a mystery. Even without pointing to much evidence of it directly, we are left knowing that something truly horrible was taking place in the prison, having almost nothing to do with the pictures we all saw and found abhorrent. The "real torture", someone says, was taking place behind the closed doors. I highly recommend it, but I don't think I could ever watch it again.