electricland

I am vaguely curious about why two people were meeting in the conference room behind me in the dark, but hey.

Saw Shattered Glass last night (Donny, one of the systems geeks, has a mysterious and apparently inexhaustible source of movie passes). Very very good, I recommend.

Am trying to decide whether Hayden Christensen gets these whiny annoying roles because he is good at them, or because he is inherently whiny and annoying. I did try not to let my anti-new-Star-Wars prejudices get in the way, really, and I think I succeeded. I thought he was good and it was a much better part than little Anakin. But still. Whiny. There was a lot of doe-eyed "Did I do something wrong? Are you mad at me?" that seemed to bring out everyone's protective instincts but made me want to hit him.

He seemed to get away with the deception he pulled for several reasons:

- He was extremely tough on fact-checking other people's work, thereby building the expectation he would be equally tough on his own.
- He was a fantastically entertaining, talented hotshot writing nearly uncheckable stories.
- He was sweet to everybody, in a very calculating and political way. I've experienced this in work situations and it always gets right up my nose, but I tend to be very suspicious when people are overly nice for no apparent reason.
- He was political, in a very sweet and understated way.
- He was the baby of the office. (See: whiny, above.)

There was a particularly lovely moment which in my limited journalistic experience was bang on: Glass and the New Republic's editor, Chuck Lane, in a conference call with Forbes Digital trying to defend the story Forbes is trying to check. This is 1998, so the New Republic has barely joined the digital age; they certainly don't appear to have email yet. Glass faxes the URL for the website of the high-tech company in the story over to Forbes. Forbes writers (obviously infinitely more net-savvy) stare at the result in disbelief, and the resulting conversation goes something like this:

Forbes writer: "Why would a major software company put its website where only AOL members can see it?"
Glass: "Yeah, that struck me as odd too."
Forbes writer (still staring at the website, which in its entirety is about 2 pages of 24-pt Times New Roman text on a light green background): "It looks as though some hackers may have been playing a trick on you. This looks like a dummy site."
Lane: "I don't know much about the Web. Is that possible?"

I giggled.

Peter Sarsgaard (as Lane) was really good. Hope to see more of him. In fact they were all really good.

Wendy, our production coordinator, auditioned for the part of the editor's wife but didn't get it. We assured her it was OK because it really wasn't much of a part. She says "that's always the way".