- » ToastedRav.com
- » TV / Movies / Books
- » Article
The Newest Videos:
|
|
|
| The Toast - 11.21.08 - PETA Attacks Lindsay Lohan and Will Smith Stops By! | Ask St. Louis: What's Your Favorite Pick-Up Line? | Giving It A One-Two Punch: A Boxing Lesson With Sweat Gym |
Updated 56 Days ago
Nights In Rodanthe - Romance For The (Middle) Ages
Nights In Rodanthe is a chick flick of the highest order. Normally I would hesitate to reduce a movie so off-handedly, but I honestly think it wants me to. When the trailer contains a “laugh out loud” exchange of dialogue such as - “You saved my father”...(dramatic pause)…”No, we saved each other” - I think it’s safe to assume that it wears its “chick-flickness” like a badge of honor.
Diane Lane stars as Adrienne Willis, a middle-aged, recently separated woman raising two children on her own. As the movie opens her soon-to-be-ex-husband comes to pick up the children. When the kids are out of the room, he begs her forgiveness and pleads with her to take him back. She is reticent due to his extended tryst with a younger woman. (Well, they never actually say she’s younger. But they always are, right?) She refuses to answer him as she is about to babysit a friend’s bed and breakfast (located in Rodanthe) for the weekend.
It is there that she meets Dr. Paul Flanner, played by Richard Gere. He is the B&B’s only guest and he is a doctor with a secret. Sorry, I think that should probably read Doctor With A Secret. He may have had his name legally changed, I’m not sure. He’s all brooding intensity with just enough flashes of charm for her to fall in love with him over the course of 48 hours. Which isn’t this film’s running time, but it sure felt like it.
Oh, and it’s hurricane season. Gee, I wonder if the storm will hit them? I wonder if it will drive them into each other’s arms? I wonder if she’ll help him with his secret? I wonder if he’ll help her learn to love again? I wonder if the lady next to me is done with her popcorn, because I’m going to need some place to store all this vomit?
If KEZK and L.L. Bean made a Celebrex commercial and then Oprah Winfrey turned that commercial into a movie, Nights In Rodanthe would be that movie. It’s all warmly-lit, hazy focus shots of White people with afghan rugs draped across their laps, curled up on wicker furniture, drinking coffee (out of mugs so large they require two hands) while they gaze wistfully off into the distance, as the ocean breeze gently caresses them… WHEW! If that interests you (and it very well might) then run (don’t walk) to see this movie. There is absolute truth in advertising here. If the trailer looks like a movie you want to see, I assure you, this is a movie you want to see. Nights In Rodanthe is aimed so directly at middle-aged women that I think watching it may have given me menopause.
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Pretty Woman and 1 being Autumn in New York, Nights In Rodanthe gets a 4.
© Copyright 2008 ToastedRav.com and Bonneville International
An Equal Opportunity Employer all rights reserved
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.