Alexander Stuart

A truly extraordinary man and a beacon for those who believe in peace and equality: Martin Luther King, Jr. Happy Martin Luther King, Jr  Day (his assassination still saddens me deeply, so many years later) and Happy Inauguration Day to our wonderful president, Barack Obama , whose presidency MLK helped make possible. I am honored and proud to have a president who is a caring human being, intelligent, very hard-working and quietly ambitious to achieve so much in his second term. Washington has not defeated him - neither have all the ridiculous haters in this country who, from the start of his presidency (and for reasons which more often than not, I am certain, relate to racism), have tried to deny and defeat it. He is a two-term president, reelected by more than half of this nation. He is our president, we should respect him - and not allow the likes of the moron Donald Trump to be so offensive toward him. Photograph courtesy of Alex Wong/Getty Images (Gu

WARNING: THE ABOVE VIDEO CONTAINS HIGHLY DISTURBING AND VIOLENT MATERIAL, IN KEEPING WITH ITS SUBJECT MATTER. Anyone concerned about the ridiculous access to guns in this country should watch Gus Van Sant's remarkable 2003 film, Elephant, loosely inspired by the events at Columbine. The film, for the most part, has a strange semi-documentary yet almost lyrical feel to it (with some truly extraordinary Steadicam work throughout) - and captures high school life remarkably well. It also plays with time, subtly repeating events from different perspectives. The 10 minute extract here is pret ty much the culmination of the film - so if you want to watch Elephant all the way through, perhaps just stream or rent or buy it. But these images - all the more disturbing in the wake of the appalling tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown - capture something of the inanity, randomness and tragedy of mass shootings. And anyone who argues that guns don't

Courtesy of The Weinstein Company. Film is so strange. I think Daniel Day-Lewis' performance in Steven Spielberg's  Lincoln is remarkable - the hunched physicality, his voice, his utterly believable mix of idealism and pragmatism. Likewise Tony Kushner's extraordinary script - and Tommy Lee Jones , who is fabulous. Yet Lincoln doesn't excite me, doesn't get my juices flowing, the way that Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom or Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master do. Daniel Day-Lewis' remarkable performance as Abraham Lincoln. If you think about a classic (yet still Hollywood style) biopic like Lawrence of Arabia , you have something that is also centered around a remarkable performance - and with a challenging story to tell - and yet you have unforgettable imagery and a sense of your emotions being stirred in a completely different way.  The movie of my childhood - I adored it. The cut early on from Lawrence/ O'Tool

All Photographs  ©   2013 Alexander Chow-Stuart. We are becoming increasingly fond of Santa Cruz, which we visited again recently both for research for a script I'm working on and to celebrate our daughter Paradise's fourth birthday. Aside from the fact that we love the ocean with a passion that cannot be fully expressed in words, Santa Cruz has something of the feel I imagine Malibu had in the 1960s - a surf town, with a college feel as well, of course ( UCSC is close by), but without the high-end development and casual-chic of Malibu now. My early morning rumpled look. It also shares some of the appeal Miami Beach had when I first moved there in 1990 - when South Beach was first emerging as somewhere hip (I'm not suggesting Santa Cruz isn't already hip), before the massive overdevelopment and condo-ization of SoBe took over. In 1990, South Beach was still partly a retirement community, partly a crack neighborhood, mostly Art Deco, and Cuban in a w

Hudson asked me this morning what is the smallest thing in the world. We had already discussed atoms and protons, neutrons and electrons, so I told him that I thought quarks were still the smallest. Hudson thought I said corks:) I tried (valiantly, I thought) to explain that quarks are tiny particles of matter that cannot exist on their own - we have already watched a very cool cartoon in which an animated atom explains that it is indivisible , even though it has electrons z ipping around its core of protons and neutrons. I then found this wonderful - and very catchy - song about quarks , which both Hudson and Paradise love listening to. I think it's quite an achievement to make quarks fun! (WARNING: there is one expletive in Hank's spoken intro to the song and a link at the very end of the video that is unsuitable for children.) The chorus, for those who know as much about quarks as me, names the different types of quark: Up/Down, Charm/Strange and T