Crane's Inanities

Whatever you do, don't answer the "Call of Juarez"

2011-09-06T14:42:00.004-04:00

I had my first encounter with RedBox over the Labor Day weekend. Impressive. The entire process of renting and returning a movie or game from a RedBox unit is intuitive, simple and, best of all, cheap. I rented a PS3 game for one night for $2.12. No matter how terrible the game, you're pretty likely to get $2.12 worth of fun out of it.

Sadly, I put that idea to the test right off the bat by renting 'Call of Juarez: The Cartel'. I thought I was renting a western-themed game. As you can see, the front artwork features an old hardcase in a wide-brimmed hat and duster aiming a double-barrelled shotgun at the 'camera'. Western iconography all over this thing. "Oh good," I thought. "A 'Red Dead Redemption' rip-off." Even warmed-over imitation 'Red Dead' would feed my hunger for more old West video game action. At least until the next Rare-produced 'Red Dead' title comes out.

Much smaller though, are the lady and gent on either side wearing contemporary clothes. Wish I'd noticed them before I'd rented.

From the press release: "As with past Call of Juarez games, Call of Juarez: The Cartel is from inception to execution, a Western shooter."

It's actually not. It's a crime game. Instead of running your avatar around saloons and liveries and ranches, your avatar runs in and out of the ghetto, the barrio, strip clubs, and gang hideouts. Blecch. Not to mention the hazy backgrounds, the repellant characters you either play or run with, and sub-par shooting experience. So I got took a little bit. But with Redbox, even the terrible video-game rental experiences don't sting so bad because it's only one night, and it's only $2.12. So to sum up, Redbox: good. Call of Juarez: The Cartel: bad.

A Song of Ice and Entitled Jerks

2011-08-17T16:37:00.005-04:00

Just finished reading a fascinating article about George RR Martin in The New Yorker. Martin is, of course, the author of 5 novels that will eventually make up a 7-part series called 'The Song of Ice and Fire'. As some of you already know, I've been obsessed with these books for the entirety of 2011. My poor, put-upon wife has borne the brunt of my fixation. She's had to endure, among other things, incessant playing of the Game of Thrones soundtrack, constant humming of the 'Game of Thrones' theme, rambling discourses on the differences between the HBO show and the book it's based on, forecasts on the scenes likely to play out in season 2 and how well they'll play, filling every other stray silence with updates on characters from the new book, "A Dance with Dragons" which I am sipping one chapter at a time, and more than a few times, my taking on the patois of the series, affecting a Renaissance festival-y faux-English accent, and holding conversations in this voice. Even though I can see how deflating it must be for her to see her husband this way --- after all, it's not possible to get farther away from the Alcide-ideal than a grown man drawing a Nerf sword from his thumb and index-finger scabbard and shouting random character names from the series -- I'm helpless not to do it. So yeah, I need to get out more and read other things. I know.

Anyway, the New Yorker article. It's a profile of Martin written shortly before the publication of book 5, and it focuses on his relationship with his fans, particularly those who've become not just ornery at how long they've had to wait for this latest tome to land, but highly critical. Some of them so annoyed as to start their own websites (like, "Is Winter Coming?") where posters and commenters bash Martin and his work ethic. It's a fascinating look at where the relationship between popular genre authors and their fan-base stands, how it can sour, and asks some interesting questions. Like, what exactly does an author owe his fans? Anything? And is the sense of entitlement that creates this frustration generational?

Worth checking out.

You Got Served by a Fiddler on the Roof

2011-01-03T21:34:00.002-05:00

I haven't actually seen either of these movies, but mashing these two movies together seems pretty inspired.

Enjoy it, ya herd?

One More Inception Post

2010-09-02T22:49:00.001-04:00

Oh but this made me laugh.

(Hat tip to The Daily Dish)

Musings on a White-out Tape Dispenser, and Newsmap

2010-08-25T15:40:00.003-04:00

There's a curved indentation molded into the plastic of the Bic Wite-Out tape dispenser, just to the southwest of the 'W' in 'Wite-Out', that you can put your fingernail into and, without much effort, get the whole thing to spin around really fast. Satisfying torque. Aside from the noise of the twirling, which is a kind of hollow, blunt scraping sound, you could really just spin that sucker forever and not really have to worry too much about it skittering across the desk.

Anyway. It's slow at work.

Unrelated and marginally more interesting, a co-worker pointed me to this site today: Newsmap.

Newsmap presents all the news items of the day in colored blocks of various sizes, color representing what sort of news it is (world, national, sports, etc.), and the size representing how many articles related to this story are extant on the web. I'm sure it's a bit more complicated than that, but the resulting display is simple, clean, and very user-friendly. If you bring your cursor over a news box, a pop-up window comes up with the a short summary of the story. When you click the box, you're taken to a new window/tab. Me likey. Doubt it'll streamline my surfing much, but it gives a nice overview if you're in a pinch and want to get caught up on the Right Now right now.

From the Creators of South Park, Team Inception

2010-08-23T22:03:00.001-04:00

Hi-frickin-larious.

Franzen's New Book and New Look at Jack London

2010-08-16T21:46:00.005-04:00

Book excitement. Jonathan Franzen's new novel, "Freedom", his first since 2001's brilliant "The Corrections", will be released on August 31st. And the reviews! The New York Times calls it "both a compelling biography of a dysfunctional family and an indelible portrait of our times" Others are similarly glowing. I cannot wait.

Also, a very interesting article on Jack London from Slate.com. When I was in school and my teachers talked about London, they mentioned briefly that he taught himself to write and then assigned us his short story about the wolf. Or whatever it was about. What we didn't learn was that London was a devoted socialist as well as an inveterate racist. Now I'm not one of those guys who think a writer's biography is just as important as their work, but some of that biographical information might have been useful to know while reading to, you know, place his work in some context.

School always seems to find a way to make fascinating people, places, and things much less so, doesn't it?

A Bit More on Inception

2010-08-13T08:30:00.000-04:00

I went on so long writing this comment in response to Craig's comment on my "Inception" post, I thought it might be better to just post the whole thing up here.

First, do go to the comments section and read Craig's comments -- the details he noticed are awesome and seem to put the case beyond a doubt that Leo was trapped in a dream (and also show I was only paying some kind of half-attention). I particularly liked this observation: "There are no establishing shots or lead ins to scenes. Everything starts in the middle, causing you to maybe ask "How did I get here?", not unlike the test they mention in the movie." That is so true, and another great and subtle thing Nolan did to give the whole movie that dream-like quality that's only really apparent after you leave the theater.

Craig also asked: "Why would Dom's subconscious produce so much exposition? Have you ever explained how something works to yourself in a dream?"

I actually feel like I have woken from dreams where I've had what seemed like elaborate concepts explained to me, and during the dream, all that exposition seems so cogent and well-written but it's logic fades shortly after waking, if any stays at all. So the exposition aspect felt correct to me.

Which made me think of an alternate interpretation.

After the movie, the wife and I followed the 'it was all a dream' concept to one possible conclusion: that the concept of 'shared dreaming' that was so integral to the plot was itself an elaborate figment of the dream. We dismissed it because if that were true, all the film's action would be just so much dreamy irrelevance. If nothing of the film can be accepted at face value, then what was the point exactly?

But thinking about it now, it does seem plausible and even narratively legitimate that the concept of shared dreaming was part of a dream. The film, all a dream, could have been the story of a smart guy trapped in a coma or life-support or whatnot, experiencing his subconscious's last best attempt to wake him from his dream and into real life, ending with Leo's failure to rise to that challenge. Because the whole idea of shared dreaming -- with that nifty, never-explained old reel-to-reel-style equipment they were able to just dream up at every dream-level -- did seem sketched in, just present enough to plausibly get the plot and action flowing. Again, to me, very dream-like.

So if it is all a dream, even the shared-dreaming conceit, a lot of the film still works. If Leo were in a coma, the people he cares about most would make appearances, and when they did, strong emotions would accompany them, as they do in the movie. Extreme grief, guilt, and terror in the scenes with his wife, Marion Cotillard, warm regard and affection in the scene with Michael Caine -- maybe the people whose accompanying emotion is most intense are the people closest to Leo in real life. If this is so, one wonders then who Lucas Haas's character might have been to him, as his departure from the movie seemed to particularly wound Leo.

Leo's subconscious, knowing he is not awake, could very plausibly "build" this elaborate dream-plot so that Dream-Leo can confront questions of 'Am I awake or am I dreaming?' which may help him understand his plight so he might then wake from it. Which is why, perhaps, when it is safe within the dream's structure, the dream sets up multiple circumstances where Leo can "practice" waking up, from all those dreams within dreams, to give him the courage to do it the final, most important time. Maybe the end of the climactic sequence, where all of Leo's teammates are waking from one dream after another, is his subconscious's most direct assault on Leo's conscious mind to get Leo himself to wake.

Just a possibility. Some of this stuff I feel like I could argue with myself about ("...but if that's so then the whole Saito sub-plot which was so awesome isn't as awesome. And if that's so, the whole move becomes purely a technical exercise in precision without any real identifiable heart.", etc.) but I think the movie is left open to interpretations like that. I almost feel that the Nolan brothers might even have some page-long "secret script" that explains What-was-really-going-on, but then that may be overestimating Nolan, which I guess is possible.

But it's also just fun to talk about this movie.

Wherein this Blogger Reviews Two Novels, one being 'The Passage" by Justin Cronin, and the other being "The Secret Speech" by Tom Rob Smith

2010-08-09T08:30:00.000-04:00

Been reading a bit this summer. Just finished a couple books I thought I'd let you know about.

1.) "The Passage" by Justin Cronin. This was billed by some as the event book of the summer, none more vehemently than by Stephen King. He gave the slobberiest blurb for the dust jacket, called into 'Good Morning America' while Cronin was on to gush about the book, and hell, during my moment with the King during a book signing in November of last year, this was the book he told me to read, (not, as I first thought, "The Bastard" by John Crowley, which doesn't exist). So, massive doorstop in hand ("The Passage" is 1,000+ pages long), I was primed for a sweeping, "Stand"-esque post-apocalyptic vampire story that would wash away some of the residue of awfulness the 'Twilight' stories had deposited all over the popular culture. And though the book hasn't had a 'Twilight'-like cultural impact its publishers (or King) hoped it would, it compensates by being a pretty good novel.

For the first and best section, we follow a young girl named Amy while she's in the care of a wide and harrowing assortment of people. First her mother, than a nun, then an FBI agent whose own daughter died some years ago, and finally a secret project in the Rocky Mountains that's attempting to weaponize something that really shouldn't be weaponized. In short order, that which was contained within the mountain escapes, mere horror is loosed upon the world, and the world's population is quickly divided into 3 camps: the dead (most), the infected (plenty), and the survivors (very very few). That's about all I can tell you without giving you more information than you need to enjoy the book, but I will say that a lot of readers, including myself, found the 2nd section of the book to be a bit jarring.

Though "The Passage" is clearly intended for a wide readership with its horrific and energetically described violence, visual action sequences fit for a Tony Scott movie, and a big cast of identifiable likable characters, it is not without its own moments of prose-poem lyricism that seem more suited to a more staid "literary" novel, perhaps written by a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop (which Cronin happens to be). "The Passage" is long, and I like that Cronin takes his time when needed, particularly in the second section. I was disappointed that more practical considerations seemed to take precedence over his artistic motives as the third section unfolded. I felt like Cronin realized he'd lingered too long over the plot previously and now had to get things moving if he wanted to have the book wind up where he'd envisioned. The effect makes the fast-moving third section feel like a summer action pic, and, worse, a summer action pic that was rushed into production without a strong script.

The acknowledgments at the end seem to confirm my suspicions somewhat, as quite a few words are dedicated to thanking Ridley and Tony Scott and the fine folks at Scott Free productions for ... well, it's not clear what Scott Free did for "The Passage" pre-publication other than buy the movie rights, but I wonder. I like my novelists to keep on one side of a bright white line between their work and the films Hollywood sometimes makes from them, and including a 'thanks' to a production company in one's novel would seem to blur that line. I want the filmmakers to have to figure out how to adapt a novel into a movie, I don't want the novelist trying to tailor their book to make it more multiplex-friendly. The suspicion this may have happened is, I think, a reasonable one.

Which is not to say that part 3 of "The Passage" is lousy, because it's not, but it wasn't as nearly as impressive as the first parts, which is a shame. Two more books are set to follow this, so I'm hopeful Cronin will turn off his inner screenwriter and concentrate on putting out two novels that work best as novels and let Scott Free worry about adapting the stuff into good movies.

2.) The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith. The follow-up to Smith's brilliant debut novel, "Child 44", "The Secret Speech" has a lot to live up to, and for the most part, sadly, falls short.

Set in the Soviet Union shortly after Stalin's death, we are once again joined with former MGB Chekist (MGB was the precursor to the KGB), Leo Demidov who, with his wife Raisa, is now raising two girls orphaned when Leo's MGB team murdered their parents during the events of "Child 44". The horror that brought this family into existence continues into the fraught Demidov household. Though Leo has resolved, naively, to be a loving father to his adopted daughters to counterbalance the evil of what he did to their parents, 14-year old Zoya, the elder of the two daughters, is consumed with thoughts of vengeance against Leo. She sneaks into his room each night and places the edge of a kitchen knife to his throat, daring herself night after night to kill her adoptive father and avenge her parents. Soon, other ghosts from Leo's brutal past emerge to make Leo's life hell and the novel gets going.

With "The Secret Speech" Smith continues the ghastly tour of Stalin's USSR he began in 'Child 44'. In that book Smith showed how Stalin's MGB terrorized an entire society into submission by turning all citizens into informants: even a close friend was capable of sending an innocent person to the gulags; often, if they did not inform, it was they who were shipped off to Siberia to be worked to death. And though Stalin's notorious gulags are referenced in "Child 44", it isn't until halfway through "The Secret Speech" that Smith manages to steer the action into one of them. But the exigencies of the plot give us not a dramatized depiction of the gulag's horrors, a kind of airport-y distillation of Solzhenitsyn, which is what I'd hoped to read, but rather a fast-moving prisoner revolt inspired by the secret speech of the title. The day-to-day of the gulag is not explored here, which I found disappointing.

If "Child 44" read like a talented writer's bid to pen the thriller everyone would talk about for years, 'Secret Speech" reads more like the second book the author had to write to fulfill a contract. It's a page-turner, no doubt -- the short, snappy sentences and short, snappy chapters make the pages seem to turn of their own volition -- but this fast pace may be "The Secret Speech's" fatal flaw. Smith's engineered this thing to move so quickly that "Child 44"'s moral fog and pungent atmosphere of dread -- novelistic effects achieved only when the plot is allowed to slow down -- are almost entirely missing from this second novel in this series. The result is a story that vanishes from the imagination the instant the last page is turned.

Though I was disappointed with "Secret Speech", the quality of "Child 44" gives me room to hope that the third and, I would assume, final book in the Leo Demidov trilogy will exceed this installment.

"They hide in plain sight."

2010-08-03T08:30:00.000-04:00

I checked out the 2-hour premiere of AMC's new conspiracy-themed drama "Rubicon" last night (2 million people tuned in, a record for AMC original programming) and really enjoyed it. I was impressed by how entertaining the creators, Jason Horwich and Henry Bromell, managed to make two slowly paced hours so enthralling.

The premise, briefly: Will Travers (played by James Badge Dale), is a mild-mannered widow who works as an analyst for a small, unnamed intelligence agency in New York. They break codes and find out the names of guys who appear in long-lens photographs. When Will's boss is killed in a commuter train accident, the weird crossword puzzle clue Will discovered a few days prior, the one clue that appeared in 11 different newspapers' crossword puzzles on the same day, seems suddenly relevant. The first, subtle shadings that something is off about his boss's death begin to take shape in his mind.

"Rubicon" derives most of its narrative frisson from the dramatic irony of watching Will go about his normal life while we, the audience, know something shadowy and dangerous is playing just beneath the surface of things, contemplating a move that could end Will's life. Watching the show I was reminded at times of 'The Matrix'. One of my favorite sections of that movie are those scenes before Anderson understands the truth of his existence. Now imagine that section expanded to a 13-hour season of television and you've got 'Rubicon', more or less.

One of the reasons why 'Rubicon' is better than your average show is that the show-runners give the audience space to figure out what's going on without beating anyone over the head. One example: early on in episode one, we see Will Travers's boss, David (played by Peter Gerety who "Wire"-freaks will remember as Judge Daniel Phelan) through Will's office window, avoiding the number 13 in the staff parking lot like it's covered in Ebola. He's a superstitious guy, David. Later on, after David's died in the train crash, Will goes back to the train station and finds David's car parked in the parking spot numbered '13'.

There are a number of ways the show could have handled the revelation. What they didn't do was have Will go up to the number, look down at it in disbelief, then cut to a 2-second flash of the earlier scene where David had avoided the '13' in the parking lot. Nor does Will murmur: "But David hated the number thirteen!" The writers handle it subtly, and visually. That whole show don't tell thing. They let us figure it out with Will.

Another thing 'Rubicon' does well is capture the nuances of working in an office. It's actually the dynamic in Will's 4-man analyst unit that's been sticking in my head all day today. It's depiction of working in an office is not satirical or blown up to outlandish proportions, but a look at a real honest-to-God office. The show gives an impression of what it's like to work long days and long weeks with the same idiosyncratic people, how it feels to do mentally draining tasks all day, everyday, and how crushing the pressures from 'the bosses' can seem. Because Will gets promoted halfway through, and this was particularly well done, we see how those pressures seem amplified the higher the corporate ladder one climbs.

My one worry for the show is that it may have the same dramatic longevity of "Prison Break". Once that tattooed freak broke his bro out out of the pen, the wind seemed to go out of the show's sails. Before long they were breaking back into another prison just to break out again. Once 'Rubicon' reveals the conspiracy, where does the show go from there? Does it just go deeper and deeper? Or does it shift from discovering the conspiracy to trying to expose it? And will viewers stay interested if it takes 3 seasons to reveal it?

Bottom-line is this show's got a great tone, great characters, and some nicely played moments of real creepiness. If there existed a world where a powerful, moneyed cabal could plot something of the magnitude of 9/11 without anyone learning the truth, then that is the world 'Rubicon' inhabits. For me, exploring that world has a lot of dramatic potential. I'm looking forward to episode 3.

(The show airs on Sundays at 9PM on AMC for those who're considering setting their DVRs.)

New Look!

2010-07-28T22:14:00.002-04:00

Because some of the YouTube videos I was linking to were getting cut almost in half by the Blogger template I was using, I wanted to change it up with one of the new templates they offer. I like it, hope it's not too offensive to anyone, what with those papery Luddite-loved relics shown in the background. What are they called again? Buh-yewks? Something like that?

Next I need to update my profile picture and change the drawing of the dolt next to the title.

Chris and Hans want to blow your mind one more time

2010-07-28T08:30:00.000-04:00

To add a bit more to my previous 'Inception' post, click on this link.

Some of you may have already seen this on Facebook, but for those who haven't, definitely worth a look.

I didn't think I could be more impressed with the movie, and then Hans goes and does something like this.

Inception (Spoiler-Heavy Review)

2010-07-27T08:54:00.006-04:00

There’s a moment early on in ‘Inception’, in a scene where Cobb (Leonardo DeCaprio) is speaking to his grandfather, Miles (played by Michael Caine) about what Cobb must do to get back Home. Cobb’s got to get around some official Charges that are keeping him Away. It was during this scene that I thought I’d outsmarted Christopher Nolan and figured out the hidden truth of the film.

But, of course, Nolan’s a smart guy and knows everyone going to see his movie about dreams and dreaming is primed to question the reality of the story’s supposedly non-dream reality, and so it wasn’t long after this scene that I realized I was missing the point a little bit. ‘Inception’’s not about twist endings a la ‘Sixth Sense’ or ‘Shutter Island’, (though the ending is the part of the movie that's most fun to talk about). It’s really a whip-smart exploration of dreams and what it feels like to dream told in a multiplex-friendly crime-action framework. The whole thing works brilliantly.

"Inception" tells the story of Cobb, a man with a rare talent for 'shared dreaming', a cutting edge science in this world that allows a group of people to have the same dream and act consciously and powerfully within that dream. The particular skill-set Cobb and a very few dependable practitioners have is the art of Extraction: going into a person's subconscious, via their dreams, and taking out of it something (usually a lucrative secret) the mark wants to keep hidden. After Cobb and his team audition as Extractors for a Japanese businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe), Saito offers Cobb a different job that will help him beat those Charges and get back Home to see his two children. Cobb must delve into the subconscious of Robert Fischer, Jr. (Cilian Murphy), an heir to Saito's rival, and implant into Mr Fischer's subconscious the idea to break up the empire he is heir to as soon as it comes into his possession. To make it more difficult, they have to make Fischer believe it's his own idea. What they're attempting is called Inception.

Reading that synopsis it would seem that nearly everything is standing in Nolan's way of making this movie work, most significantly, 20 or so years of uninspired studio group-think. 'Inception' is not a sequel. It's not based on a popular novel or known character. It is original. The concept is the highest of the high. The requirements of the plot do not allow for any oversimplification or "dumbing down". To make 'Inception' into a success, Nolan had to make a cinematic treatise about the nature of dreaming, memory, consciousness, and unconsciousness fun, and he had to make it entertaining enough for an audience large enough to justify the budget he needed to film something this ambitious. The success of 'Inception' seems to me the film industry story of the year, and, with luck, will usher in a new slate of original movies that haven't had their ideas scaled back by timid executives because it might not play for the folks who got a brain-ache watching "2012". (A really dumb movie I loved, by the way).

The film is remarkable for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it brings together many of the top film artists working at the height of their powers. Christopher Nolan, obviously, credited as director and screenwriter of the film, tops his previous efforts with this film, which is in itself a major accomplishment. Leonardo DiCaprio does great work here, firmly established now as one of the few legitimate movie stars with unimpeachable acting chops. The ensemble acting is fantastic all-around, Cilian Murphy and Ken Watanabe turning in particularly compelling performances here. Hans Zimmer's music and Wally Pfister's cinematography complement the film perfectly, the moments where Zimmer uses bass like an aural shiv are always welcome. And, much as I hate to say it, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is pretty good in this. He doesn't have much to do acting-wise, but he's the Inception team's stoic Go-To Guy, and I couldn't help but like him in this.

That a movie about the chaotic and usually nonsensical world of dreams is written and shot with such mathematical precision gives the film a nice underlying dissonance that puts the viewer off-balance, and keeps them from asking the story's most pertinent question: is the world from which Cobb is trying to escape through dreaming itself a dream?

I believe the answer is yes: Cobb is stuck in a dream. (And in 50 years, off the subject for a minute, I believe film students will marvel at the coincidence of one actor, Di Caprio, appearing in two thematically identical films (Shutter Island and Inception) and then marvel again that both movies were released in the same year.)

On the film's rules alone, I think they establish the very real possibility that it's a dream, even beyond that final shot, don't they? Do we ever actually see Cobb's totem, his little metal top, ever have an uninterrupted spin so we can see it fall over as it's supposed to? There's a scene in the bathroom I remember where Cobb attempts to let it spin out, but the top falls to the floor before it can finish or not finish its spin.

What was more persuasive for me that Cobb's "real" world was in fact a dream, was the way Nolan shot the "real" world of 'Inception'. To me, it all had the qualities of a dream; a lucid dream, maybe, but still a dream. Nolan never gives any place a feeling of specificity (to use a word from the film). So no landmarks (except the Eiffel Tower, seen in a startlingly weird long shot of Paris), no branded products, no billboards, no bit of grit or earthiness or mise en scene designed to give any particular setting a feeling of authenticity. Nolan seems to tend towards this dreamy style of filmmaking in his movies anyway, but he never goes all the way like he does in 'Inception'.

Compare, for instance, the scene in "Dark Knight" where the Joker enters the restaurant kitchen for the underworld summit and the scene where Cobb is talking to his grandfather Miles (Caine) in the university classroom. In the kitchen scene, not only is the Joker grungy and grimy and REAL, the finger-streaks where he's applied the grease paint plainly visible, but so are the mundane stainless steel kitchen appliances pushed up against the walls, the dirty floor, the cheap TV that makes the table it's on bow slightly, the chairs that scrape and squeak as people settle into them.

Contrast that with the university room in which Cobb and Miles speak. It is less a realistic classroom than it is the quintessential ideal of a university classroom. The wood-panel walls that glow warmly, the chalkboard wiped clean except for what Miles has written on it, the neatly cluttered desk upon which he is taking neat little notes in a tidy little notebook. It's all so made to order, so very collegiate and professorial, each thing such a distillation of itself, that after the scene ends you forget everything about it except the fact that it was set in a university classroom. Which lends the scene a dream-like quality because after we wake from a dream, all the details not directly tied with what was urgently happening seem to melt away first, don't they? In my memory of the film, all the places in the "real" world adhere far more to what Cobb's Platonic ideal of these settings would be than they do to any identifiable reality of that place. The private plane on which they begin their Inception mission, for example, so perfectly embodies the knee-jerk idea of a "private plane" without offering any concessions to the reality of an actual private plane, that one can't help but guess that this place, too, is a dream-place.

The moment I mentioned in the first part of this post, during the scene between DiCaprio and Miles, was for me one of the clearest bits of evidence towards the "it's all a dream" theory of "Inception". The moment happens when Caine asks, in effect, if DiCaprio wants to go Home. Caine's eyes are hopeful, intent; he's hanging on DiCaprio's reply. DiCaprio thinks about it for a moment, conflicted, and when DiCaprio starts in about the Charges against him that prevent him from going Home, we cut back to Caine and watch his expression drop with disappointment. Not disappointment at the sad fact of DiCaprio's legal difficulties, but a disappointment more like that of Mark Ruffalo's character at the end of 'Shutter Island' when DiCaprio, far from cured, reassumes his former identity.

Could it be that Miles is there in a shared dream with Cobb, trying to persuade him to wake up? Or maybe he's just an aspect of Cobb's subconscious, the part of DiCaprio that knows he's dreaming, trying to gently pull him out of this endless dream?

There may be more moments like this one that point in the same direction, or even different directions, but this was stood out to me.

I did have a few quibbles with the movie, as ever. Nolan's fight scenes are still largely rendered into a kinetic blur. I want to see the fight, I don't want to sense the energy of a fight. The James Bond-esque interlude at the snowy mountain fortress was the least interesting and least dream-like of the dream levels, all that endless skiing and snowmobiling, and it seemed the action stayed there the longest. Another issue I had was with the way Nolan had his characters give valuable exposition at the same time he presents arresting visuals to the audience. Kind of like getting the audience to "watch" the credits by also running additional scenes or a gag reel: no one's actually reading the credits when there's a gag reel, and no one can actually absorb exposition when the world is breaking in half and stacking on top of itself. I felt this pull in two directions more than a couple times watching this movie. Maybe it was a cheap way to guarantee repeat business.

But given the number of bravura moments in this movie, the quibbles fade to insignificance. At the culmination of the film's climactic sequence, when the van hits the water and the elevator drops in the gravity-less hotel and Cilian Murphy reaches into the safe and pulls out the pinwheel -- I'm sure there were a lot of talented filmmakers who watched Nolan pull off that sequence and cursed his name for pulling off something that high-wire that beautifully. I haven't seen a sequence of that kind done that well for a long time, maybe not since Lecter's escape sequence in "Silence" I'm sure there must be other great examples in the intervening 20 years, but that's the one that comes to mind.

A lot of fanboys are already, of course, putting Nolan in the same league as the Great Stanley Kubrick. Obviously that's premature, but I will say that with 'Inception', which comes after 'Dark Knight' which itself came after the overlooked but genius 'Prestige', it's looking promising. Nolan's batting a thousand at the moment, and his consistently calm, assured handling of films with complex ideas, particularly so with 'Inception', makes the wait for the third installment in his Batman series seem even longer, and his next original movie an even bigger event.

Deadly Bear from a Galaxy Far Far Away

2010-06-18T00:11:00.003-04:00

The only thing more frightening than running into a bear in the wilderness? Running into a bear armed with a light saber. I know this goes without saying, but two hours of this would have been so much better than 'Phantom Menace'.

Anyway, this got me laughing, thought I'd share the joy.

"A-Team" and "The Fountain"

2010-06-15T08:30:00.000-04:00

A couple reviews of some movies I watched over the weekend.

1.) The A-Team. Not bad. Some of the reviews I’d glanced at prior to seeing the movie seemed to suggest the ridiculousness in the film’s trailers was the kind that induces eye-rolling, not happy grins. So going in I wasn’t sure if even a turned-off brain could enjoy what was to come. But to my surprise, 'The A-Team' is actually a tightly-written, smart-sounding action movie (not actually smart, unfortunately), more “Mission: Impossible” than “Smokin’ Aces”, with controlled direction from Joe Carnahan that never loses track of the plot during all the chasing around in search of the McGuffin. Couple small things I liked: 1.) Major Dad’s Gerald McRaney’s appears in the film; a pleasant blast from the past. 2.) Jessica Biel is better in the film than she is in the trailers. 3.) Newcomer Brian Bloom turns in a funny and legitimately menacing performance. The role is a by-the-numbers crazy mercenary bad guy, but Bloom pulls it off pretty well. I expect to see more of this guy. (Fun factoid: he also co-wrote the script.) 4.) Stay through to the end of the credits.

Quality movies have been hard to come by at the multiplex this summer (all year if you want to be technical), so if you've been avoiding the movies lately due to crap selection and just want to go and see something fun, this is your ride.

2.) The Fountain. Possibly the exact opposite of ‘The A-Team’. I DVRed this off HBO and watched it over a couple days. I’m of two minds about "The Fountain". On one hand it’s not the kind of movie I usually like. It’s plodding, self-serious, and depressing as all hell. It’s a wonder it was ever made; even more wondrous Brad Pitt was for so long attached and ready to star. But on the other hand, the film’s director, Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler), manages some moments of profundity in ‘The Fountain’ that are almost never seen in films outside of the art-house, and even then only rarely. Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz star as Tommy and Izzi, a married couple trying to deal with Izzy’s worsening disease while Tommy, a researcher/surgeon, works tirelessly to find a treatment that could cure her.

Pretty much everything else about the movie seems open to interpretation. Tommy’s overweening desire to keep Izzy alive may be an eternal struggle his soul has grappled with for centuries, life after reincarnated life. The first of these lives is Tomas's (also played by Jackman), a Ponce de Leon-like Conquistador, looking to find the fountain of youth. But is what we see of Tomas's life in Spain and later in the New World truly memories of a past life, or are they just scenes from Izzy’s unfinished novel, or both? Is Tom Creo, the future reincarnation of Tommy who floats in a bubble with the tree that grew from Izzy’s grave, actually an immortal Tommy still trying to save his wife? Or is this some elaborate vision Tommy's having on his own death-bed? Or is all of it a vision the Conquistador Tomas has on top of the Mayan temple? Are we even meant to take this all literally? I’d have to see it a few more times to attempt any kind of interpretation and I doubt I'm up to sitting through all those monkey-skull-cutting and Rachel-Weisz-on-her-deathbed scenes to get there, but I do concede it is gratifying to see a movie that rewards thought. Kind of like Transformers 2. Anyway, like I said, I'm of two minds on this movie. Couple things I liked in particular: 1.) The music is incredible. Elegiac and moving. Clint Mansell's done a great job here. 2.) Hugh Jackman. I was never quite sure Jackman could act until I saw this movie. He does good work in everything he does, of course, but I didn't know he could really play any moment required of him until this. He is amazing in 'The Fountain' and deserves better than the likes of that abyssmal Wolverine movie, or the final X-Men sequel. 3.) Aronofsky's ambition. Even though I don't think this movie totally works, I admire Aronofsky for going there and committing so many years of his career to seeing this go in front of cameras. I wish Hollywood had more directors out there willing to go as hard as they can to realize their vision. You know, like Brett Ratner. For students of film, definitely worth seeing. For a fun way to pass a couple hours, this one isn't it.

"The Special Relationship"

2010-06-14T08:30:00.000-04:00

I watched a new movie on HBO last weekend called ‘The Special Relationship’. Starring Michael Sheen as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Dennis Quaid as President Bill Clinton, the movie depicts the relationship between the two men through some of the most important moments of their political careers.

Covering the period of US-UK politics from 1996 to 2001, “The Special Relationship’ opens with Blair and Clinton meeting for the first time at the White House months before Blair’s election to 10 Downing, and closes during their farewell meeting at Blair’s country estate, the end of Bush v Gore playing out as a backdrop. In between these events, filmmakers depict the highs of their partnership (working towards peace in Northern Ireland), as well as the lows (their pitched disagreements over the use of force against Serbia). The result is not a bad way to spend a couple hours if the politics of that time interest you, but even for political junkies the difficulty of trying to shoehorn their generally unremarkable reigns into a movie does show from time to time.

It begins promisingly enough. Blair is ushered into the Oval Office for his first meeting with Clinton and finds Bill nowhere to be seen. Turns out he's in the side office talking to some foreign head of state. Political nerds (and readers of Ken Starr's entry into the canon of high pornography) will recognize the small office as the site of many an encounter with a certain intern, but for the first meeting of these two heavyweights in a movie that's about their working relationship, it's pretty tepid. Then Clinton and Blair have a chat about the eponymous "special relationship" between their two countries, a concept Clinton casually dismisses, reciting a short list of countries who can actually claim to have any such relationship with the US. In this scene, though, you do get a sense of how these two men perceived themselves as world leaders helping to usher in a leftward and perhaps permanent shifting in the Western political landscape. Heady stuff. Of course the scene is set before the scandals of Clinton's impeachment and Blair's illegal war-making, but even still, their optimism doesn't seem naive. In a better movie, this scene might have had the feel of tragedy.

The only really interesting theme the movie explores, and even this is done in an undramatic, too-subtle-by-half fashion, is the idea that the character of Tony Blair rather than George W Bush's powers of persuasion brought Britain so completely into the Iraq War. They show this through Blair's almost messianic belief in the power of strong nations to help the victimized around the world, specifically those being ethnically cleansed in the former Yugoslavia. It was this world-view that put Blair at loggerheads with Clinton over the deployment of ground forces in Bosnia: Blair wanted them, Clinton didn't. So when Bush came around looking for allies to help him oust "the guy who tried to kill [his] dad," Tony Blair was hardly just along for the ride. The movie suggests Bush was just the kind of American president Tony Blair had been looking for.

Michael Sheehan, who seems to have been given an unspoken but unbreakable lifetime contract to play Tony Blair in all films, does competent work here, but one wonders at times if Blair was really quite so innocent and bright-eyed as the movie suggests. Dennis Quaid, who admirably gained some weight to play Clinton, goes halfway towards an impression of the former president, but then steps back to create a scowling, self-serious Clinton-character who never really rings true.

Hope Davis, however, who plays Hillary Clinton, needs to talk to Sheehan's agents about securing one of his lifetime contracts on playing a living human being, because she nails Hillary so well I wouldn't like to see anyone else give an attempt. From her barking laugh, to the prim honor-student persona she cultivated in those early days who could be both steely and feminine, Davis gets it scary-right. It's helpful of course that Davis and Hillary resemble each other, and that Davis, who seems to specialize in sour, waspy characters, is playing the Queen Bee of sour disaffection. But even if it seems easy, it's not; the mind-image of Hillary Clinton we all have fades into the background as we watch Davis channel Hillary, and that's no easy trick.

Overall 'The Special Relationship" has the feel of a weak prologue to some eventual Tony Blair bio-pic, and prologues generally don't make for good feature films. I'd mark this as for political junkies only.

Nude Tayne

2010-05-06T20:29:00.005-04:00

Now I need to see everything Tim and Eric have done because this is hilarious. I especially love the moment when Paul Rudd gets the version of Tayne he asks for.

And yeah, I just got this off of Facebook.

Note: It doesn't show on the blog very well, so to see it in its full glory, please just click on the video to go to the YouTube page. Or just click here.

Hardly Worth Posting

2010-05-06T17:08:00.004-04:00

Well. Work is dead and I’ve got an hour before I can leave. So here's some random stuff.

1.) Peter Travers of Rolling Stone has weighed in on ‘Iron Man 2’. For a new TV spot, the studio's excerpted his review into this blurb: “It’s a blast from start to finish!” I know people could scour his reviews to find some ecstatic reviews of awful movies, but I think he’s right more often than not. So I now have a reasonable hope ‘Iron Man 2’ will be fun. In related news, I’m also pretty hyped about the teaser-trailer the studio’s running with ‘Iron Man 2” for the new JJ Abrams/Spielberg collaboration “Super 8”.You can read more here. Or just wait till tomorrow and see it at the theater. If it comes out anything as good as "Cloverfield" I'll be happy.

2.) I’m close to finishing Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’, which I’ve been reading since… time began? Yeah, since about then. 850 pages down, 200 more to go! She's pretty good at the whole writing thing. She’s got me, a diehard Progressive, looking forward to the inevitable moment when the "looters" (basically New Deal Democrats) beg the striking industrialists and self-starters (True Men and Women) to come back to work and, with their genius and pure hearts, save the looters' worthless asses from the ruined world they’ve created through taxes and welfare.

That's it.

Kick Ass

2010-04-18T16:03:00.008-04:00

Saw "Kick Ass" on Friday night. I haven't been this disappointed by a movie I expected to be good since "Jurassic Park." The film is getting 75% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, which actually matches, roughly, how much of the movie I liked. But I think the 25% I disliked just did this movie in for me.

I'm going to put the blame for this disappointment squarely on my shoulders as I made the mistake of reading the source material a few weeks prior to the film's opening weekend. The source material, the first 8 issues of a comic series written by the current hotshit comic-book writer Mark Millar and penciled by John Romita Jr., is fantastic. It amped up my expectations for the film pretty high because it was already a pretty great screenplay and expertly "shot". The comic is exactly what the film's marketers said the movie would be: violent as hell, laugh out-loud hilarious and original. Well, as it turns out, the film's marketers were overstating their case a bit. "Kick Ass", directed by Matthew Vaughn and co-written by the comic's originator, Millar, is violent and there are some funny moments, but in the end this movie doesn't have the courage of its convictions.

"Kick Ass" follows teenager Dave Lizewski, a normal dorky kid who, like a lot of folks, defines himself by which movies, TV shows and comics he likes. And he, like his other dorky friends, is enduring the savage Darwinian landscape that is his high-crime outer-borough New York high-school. After the last in a series of routine muggings, Lizewski decides to answer the question he puts to his friends one day at their local hang-out -- "Why hasn't anyone tried to be a superhero?" -- by becoming one himself. His first run-in with criminals ends disastrously, but gives him powers of a sort -- the inability to feel pain, a skull outfitted with metal plates, and bones reinforced with steel rods. When a beating he gives a group of thugs (only slightly less vicious than the one he takes) is captured on a cell phone video and posted to YouTube, he becomes an overnight sensation -- kind of a hybrid of Tay Zonday and Capt. Sully: Kick-Ass is both absurd and heroic. But Kick-Ass's exploits also capture the attention of some seriously bad guys, who find ways to make his life hell, and trust me, it gets hellish.

"Kick Ass," the way Mark Millar orginally conceived the idea in the comic, is all about the idea of matching up the fantasy of superheroing against the reality of modern life. To do this, he mashes-up the Spider-Man and Batman mythologies and creates Kick-Ass. Kick-Ass is like Spider-Man because Lizewski is a teenage dork like Peter Parker, and Kick-Ass is like Batman because Lizewski is fighting crime armed with nothing more than his fists and non-lethal gadgetry.

In the comic, Millar has Lizewski beaten to a pulp and nearly killed in his very first crime-fighting attempt. The only way Lizewski has success in his later crime-stopping forays (and it is minimal) is because of the medical Weapon-X-ization he undergoes. In the end, Lizewski finds out that once the surface glamor of celebrity wears off, crime-fighting is a grisly, soul-killing, nightmarish enterprise, and not at all what the comics suggest it is. The comics are what they've always been: fantasy. Lizewski doesn't even get the girl (is, in fact, publicly humiliated by his version of MJ). Crime-fighting, in a word, sucks.

The makers of the film, however, only half-bought into the premise. The celebrity of being a superhero must be cool, but the reality of being a super-hero is ... also really cool? To me, that's a different story than the one that got me enthused, and not a very interesting one.

I won't exhaustively list the ways the comic improves on the movie (I'm already being annoyingly geeky as it is), but I think, overall, the things Vaughn and the writers excised from the comic all had the effect of cutting the heart out of what made the comic so refreshing. From the way they altered the relationship between Lizewski and his dream girl Katie, to the way they changed Big Daddy's back story (played by Nicholas Cage, making some interesting choices, as usual), the decisions seem to have been made with a mind to make "Kick Ass" a more standard superhero movie, to its detriment.

But then again, I'm not sure I can really fault the filmmakers for this impulse. "Watchmen," the last superhero-deconstructionist film released, was made with an overarching reverence for the source comic (with one glaring squidly exception), and its failure made all future comic-book adaptations vulnerable to being second-guessed by thoughtless studio execs for perpetuity. As soon as the 2nd weekend grosses for "Watchmen" came in, the fate of movies like "Kick Ass" was sealed. The almost-was-ness of "Kick Ass" was that earlier failure's first casualty.

A few other notes.

Aaron Johnson, who played Kick-Ass/ Dave Lizewski, was perfectly cast in this and does a great job. Conversely, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, (better known as McLovin') seemed miscast, and was never really believable as the son of a mafia don. His reading of the last line of the film was actually cringe-worthy.

The CG was, at times, very bad. One character who was set on fire looked as if he'd actually just conjured a ghost-fire in a seance. The moment this movie lost me completely can be described in one word, a piece of equipment I won't write here as it's a spoiler. But you'll know what I mean when you see it. And besides what the appearance of that bit of equipment told me about where the movie had decided to go thematically, it was also just badly done from an FX standpoint.

Given everything I've blabbed about above, the idea that I liked 75% of this movie doesn't seem to ring true, but I really was into this movie for a good while. Honest. I'm not even against alterations from quality source material for the good of a film, but when the scene between Kick-Ass and Katie Deauxma in her bedroom did a 180 from the comic and became, in essence, a dream sequence (I really thought the next cut would be to Dave in his own room, waking from a dream), the movie lost me and we never got together again. There was no reason to make that change other than fiscal reasons, and those rarely inform good creative decisions. (And given the sub-20 million box office in its opening weekend, maybe the studio guys should have let Vaughn and Millar hew closer to the original story which was, as I said before, camera ready from the get-go.)

Also: Why no "tunk" joke?! That would have frickin' killed!

Anyway, wish it had been a better film. Maybe I'm being too hard on it - it did a lot of stuff right. Maybe I just need to lay off the source material for film adaptations until after I see a movie. Or maybe I need to see fewer movies with a sister who says things in the middle of a movie like "It kinda got boring, didn't it?". I don't know.

(Just kiddin' S, you're great.)

Amazing Time Lapse of Milky Way

2010-03-07T21:24:00.000-05:00

The White Mountain from charles on Vimeo.

Unilluminating Inanities Facts

2010-03-06T22:59:00.003-05:00

After an unusually long period of effectiveness the Google/Blogger spam-filters stopped working some months ago. Or maybe the spammers finally figured out whatever trick Google had employed to keep them at bay. Whatever the case, I've been getting a lot of junk spam comments on a lot of my old blog posts of late, but none more than this one, my "Men Who Stare at Goats" review post. Right now it's got 83 comments, all of which appear to be in Japanese. Most have a helpful link to some Japanese adult sites. The spammers are also enjoying commenting on my Asheville post. 23 so far on that one.

Thought I'd share.

Winter is Coming

2010-03-04T22:06:00.003-05:00

HBO has officially picked up George RR Martin's "Game of Thrones" for a full 10-episode season.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Winter is, indeed, coming.

HBO has greenlighted highly anticipated fantasy series "Game of Thrones."

The premium network has picked up the project for a first season debut next spring (below is the first released photo from the series). Nine episodes plus the pilot have been ordered. Production will begin in Belfast this June.

From the moment the project was first announced in development, the series based on the George R.R. Martin novels has generated enormous, perhaps unprecedented, online interest for a series at such an early stage.

The sprawling tale set in the mythical land of Westeros tells the story of the noble Stark family who become caught up in high court intrigue when patriarch Eddard (played by Sean Bean) becomes the king's new right-hand man. The four-and-counting books in the series would each be used as one season of the series.
Unlike many fantasy novels, the "Thrones" series largely avoids relying on magical elements and instead goes for brutal realism -- think "Sopranos" with swords. Martin, a former TV writer ("Beauty and the Beast"), writes each chapter as a cliffhanger, which should lend itself well to series translation. David Benioff and Dan Weiss are the series creators.

That image above is the first one released to the public. Bad things have clearly happened there in the snow. Sadly, more bad things will happen soon.

The first episode will air next Spring, which is damn far away, but plenty of time for me to save my pennies and sign up for some pay cable for 10 weeks. I'm telling you folks, if this series is half as good as the first book in this series, people are going to go nuts for this. Can't wait.

In fact, do yourself a favor: click it.

New Car!

2010-03-02T18:32:00.006-05:00

The wife and I bought an '07 Prius from a CarMax on Saturday.

We'd been circling and circling the new Honda Insight, test driving it a couple times at different dealerships, but at the end of the day, we just didn't want to eat the depreciation costs that come with a new car. But we weren't exactly thrilling to the idea of a used car. Obvious financial benefits to going used, sure, but not as fun as being the very first owner of a car. So if we did go used, it'd have to be something that would keep us away from the wallet-rapists that dwell in auto-repair garages nationwide for a very long time. The memories of what was done to us to keep the Crown Vic running the last couple years are still fresh in our minds. So with the loan approval set to expire soon, the wife did a little looking on-line and found some newish Priuses with low mileage at a CarMax across town. We went, test drove, and said yes to becoming a two-car household again. Yay!

[And yes, it is a Toyota but no, it is not under recall. Yet. We're not really worried about the acceleration problem: folks who've run the numbers say Toyota drivers have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than experiencing uncontrolled acceleration. Of course it was my good buddy Akio Toyoda who told me that, but he's always been so open and candid with me and really everyone since I've known him, I feel like I can trust it.]

Some fun facts about the new car:
1.) When I drove out to my folks' house to show them the car, we drove 62 miles. Our average mpg on the way over: 57 mpg. A little more than a gallon. Of course the Prius gets amazing mileage when you're essentially coasting downhill, and since my folks appear to be much closer to sea level than I am, I basically just steered over there. It usually averages in the high 40s. So much better than the 15 mpg I got with the Crown Vic.

2.) To put the Prius in park, you press the 'park' button. Those thousands of minutes wasted and untold millions of calories expended to shove a metal stick jutting out of the steering column from one groove to another is now, finally, a thing of the past.

3.) And just when you thought I couldn't get lazier, to turn this thing on and off? Another button. Push-button start folks. Prius understands me. Prius gets how much I hate putting a key in the ignition and turning it.

4.) Reverse camera. When I back up, I see what the back of my car sees. No more backing up over bikes, cats, and toddlers. Also next time I go to the drive-in, I can back up to the screen, put it in reverse, and watch the magic of movies unfold on my dash display! Nevermind the bright white reverse lights or the unceasing beep beep sounds my car will make.

Now these features are by no means new to the automotive world, but they are quite new to me, so I feel like I've stepped into the future of cars. And the gas mileage! Who knew I hated to buy gas this much? But I do. And who needs smug liberal bumper stickers when you drive a Prius? Smug liberal is basically implied. But then again, cost-conscious conservatives also love them some fuel economy. People of all political stripes can get into this thing. Anyway, we're both enjoying the new car.

Also, total digression:

Everytime I go the NYTimes website, in the lower right-hand corner I see this photo and it's really messing with me. Thought I'd share with the group.

The Internet Age's Airbrush Virtuosos Bring You a Megan Fox Time-Lapse

2010-03-01T20:42:00.003-05:00

This is pretty amazing. Starting with a blank PhotoShop canvas, this guy, Nico DiMatttia, re-creates a very nearly photo-realistic still of Megan Fox from one of the Transformers movies. It's a time-lapse of the process and it lasts 5 minutes.

One thing I've learned from artists like this is that when you get to a certain level of mastery, skilled artists, especially those who work in paint (real and virtual), are not horrified or discouraged when the image they're creating looks like hell in the early stages. Whenever I work in color and I get my image into the looks-like-hell stage, I'm never really able to bring it out of it. I just need to practice like this guy! Anyway, worth a look (or let it load and just watch the last little bits to see how he finishes it off.)

One question to consider: did Nico choose Megan Fox as his subject for the 7-8 hours it took him to do this because he's a savvy artist and knew Megan would get his YouTube more total views, or did he choose her because he's kind of a cheeseball and the absolute best thing he could think of to spend 7-8 hours drawing in excruciating detail on PhotoShop was Megan Fox? I don't know. We report. You decide.

"Shutter Island" and "A Gate at the Stairs"

2010-02-22T21:25:00.006-05:00

I saw "Shutter Island" on Friday.

Sorry. I've told you too much already.

Anyway! I also finished a novel by Lorrie Moore called "A Gate at the Stairs." I don't know much about Ms. Moore beyond what the NY Times Book Review has told me, which is that she's an amazing writer and her last book was published more than ten years ago and ever since critics and literary types have been wringing their hands and drooling over the prospect of the next Lorrie Moore book. So in 2009, "The Gate at the Stairs" appeared and, based on the critical response, it exceeded already high expectations. So I had to pick it up.

The day after I started this book I was having a MSN chat with the owner and operator of the Hinesy.com blog and told him I was reading this book. I gave a brief (and fairly lame) description of the premise -- "A college girl takes a babysitting job" -- and he came back with some quotes from the book (taken from the internet I assume) which, admittedly, made it sound like a pretty bad book. It was pretty funny. But, despite it's young adult genre premise, "Gate" is actually a brilliant, complex and adult novel. And the writing itself, Hinesy's choice quotes aside, is actually one of the best things about it. Warm, legitimately funny, and really really smart.

The plot, roughly, concerns a college freshman in Wisconsin named Tassie. Looking for a job to keep her finances afloat while "studying" (her class-load amounts to a damning comment on the state of higher education -- in addition to wine-tasting and an intro to sufism, there's a class on war movie scores), she takes a job with a restaurant-owner/chef named Sarah Brink who doesn't have children, but is in the final stages of adopting a child. Sure enough, Sarah adopts a mixed-race toddler girl and Tassie comes on as a full-time nanny.

Assuredly bad and tragic things happen, but one of the things I liked best about the book, the thing I'll probably remember most clearly happens late in the novel, when Sarah Brink tells Tassie a story about her past. In as straight-forward a book as this, where there's no grand historical setting to rely on for mood or atmospherics, and there are no otherworldly entities to contend with when the action slows down, Moore's creation of suspense building up to the telling of this story is masterful. And she does it by putting everything into creating real characters who you come to care about and she does it all without the reader feeling the strain of her effort. As much as I'd like to lay out the secret Brink shares with Tassie, (it is devastating and beautifully told), I won't, but I will say it was nice to set the book aside afterward, get some fresh air, and reassure myself that what she'd described hadn't actually happened.

I also liked Moore's quietly scathing depiction of the adoption industry, showing that in many instances it's simply a form of legalized child-buying. After years and years of seeing adoption held up as the regret-free option for women who find themselves pregnant, it was interesting to have an adoption presented that was as emotionally damaging to the mother as the anti-choice people say abortions always are. That is not to say Moore paints the adoption process as inherently traumatic or bad, but I think she takes pains to show it as it is: an imperfect system that often seems to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

Anyway, I'm on a good-book roll with this and "2666" just before it.

Here's the one I'm into now:

It's hardcore fantasy. Not normally what I'd pick up on my own without some strong word of mouth, but the New Yorker told me that it's one of the best fantasy books written so I thought I'd give it a shot.

I'm 50 pages into this one, and I'm not sure my good book readin' roll's going to continue. Time will tell and I'll let you know.

2666

2010-02-17T20:01:00.004-05:00

I finished reading "2666" this morning. The wife went to the Capitol Building this morning to lobby on behalf of Planned Parenthood and because we are a one-car household now (we sold the Crown Victoria a couple of weeks ago) and she had to be in downtown Atlanta early, I got dropped off at Panera at 7AM this morning. Two solid hours of reading time. So I lasered in, strapped on some headphones, pressed play on my "Prestige" soundtrack playlist and got to scraping paper with corneas.

"2666" is the last novel written by a man named Roberto Bolano. When he finished it, he was not well-known in the English-speaking world, but after he died and his translations started percolating through the literary world, his fame grew and he's now considered one of the best writers of the last 50 years. If I feel a vague sadness Bolano's not alive to enjoy this justly earned attention or, more selfishly, to talk more about this and his other books, then I can't imagine what his loss must be like for the critics and fellow artists who recognize without question how important Bolano is. Reading "2666" gives one the sense that a writer of Dosteovsky's stature managed to come in and go out of this world without anyone being the wiser. At least that is the sense I have less than 24 hours out after finishing it.

I don't know what I want to say about it. Much of the action is set in a Mexican border town called Santa Theresa, a stand-in for La Cuidad de Juarez, one of the most dangerous places on earth. Juarez is primarily dangerous because of the warring drug cartels. The murder rate in the city is unimaginably high. But the sense of menace in Bolano's Juarez stand-in, Santa Theresa, is of a completely different nature, and the dread he infuses his fictional city with makes it unlike anything I've encountered in my limited reading. He makes it a legitimately scary place. Maybe to some small degree the Venice of McEwan's "In the Company of Strangers" is comparable, but that book is small and its effects limited, an hors d'œuvre to "2666"'s 9-course meal.

Much of that menace comes from what's going on in Santa Theresa. Women are being murdered. More than a hundred at least and all by the same killer or killers. In one of the five books that comprise the novel, the murders are the focus. So much so that they almost become... not a character but a fixture -- a certainty of that world so woven into the background that the constancy of the killings becomes almost darkly soothing, and when the murders temporarily stop the reader is unsettled. Each crime scene is explicated with the cold finality of police reports. The sadistic, savage brutality done to their bodies before and after the women expired is listed with that cruel phrasing common to documents of that kind. And because Bolano details the crime scene of every single murder so exhaustively -- and I didn't count but there must have been a hundred -- you can almost feel the threat of violence, particularly violence against women, hanging in the air. And if your faith in the goodness of man feels significantly degraded after finishing this book, I think Bolano's intention's been achieved. But you don't begrudge him because he's done it so masterfully. And also because you can't argue the point.

I just wrote yesterday that I was getting myself into trouble by writing long entries, thinking they all have to be long, and make some kind of point, and here I go writing and writing and eating up all of this evening time, and so far none of it's coming to anything, but I need to see if I can say a little of what I want to say about this book.

The first of the five books is about a group of literary scholars who've all become expert in the critical studies of one author: a reclusive German named Benno von Archimboldi. The second book follows a journalist in Santa Theresa who's covering a boxing match in the city, the third a professor n the city who meets with the scholars (maybe switch the last two), the fourth the murders, and the fifth is a short biography of the author Archimboldi, the writer the four scholars never locate though they search their whole lives.

There are moments during the fourth book (or "Parts" as they're called) where the thought crosses the mind that the author almost no one's seen might be the one killing these women. This idle wondering loses some of its potency as the numbers of dead women increase and then increase some more and we come to see that no one man, particularly a tall old white man who speaks only German, could do all of this killing in Mexico and not be caught after the second body's discovered. But as the fifth part unwinds, the biography of Archimboldi, the thought sneaks back in at certain points before drifting out of feasibility again, and then he shocks you by producing a legitimate connection between the old German writer and the killings in Santa Theresa and you realize that he's pulled it all off somehow. It's been a highwire act for hundreds of pages and he's made it work without our even realizing.

But really the whole book is like this. He's got this thing going where he gets the reader established into narrative patterns -- whether its the murders or the patterns of behavior the literary scholars fall into -- and the patterns lull the reader into a kind of boredom that's not really boredom. And with the reader safely lulled, Bolano's able to subtly suggest and hint at things that may or may not be relevant to the plot so that some of the same absent, purposeless thought patterns that characterize our way of thinking in everyday life are almost forcibly replicated by Bolano and confined inside the world of the story. So that while reading the reader is thinking in the same way about the events of the story as one of the characters in the novel might be. (Or maybe this is just something all great literature does or can do. Not sure.) This lulling also allows the author to drop allusions and clues to events detailed more fully later in the novel so subtly that as the reader presses forward, the story resonates without it being fully clear why it's resonating. It's almost as though Bolano is throughout this novel implanting a feeling of deja vu designed to blossom with visceral force 200 pages later.

There's more to write but I've gone on and on as it is. A fascinating, brilliant book and one I think will get better with time and re-reading.

Back from the Dead and, Apropo of Nothing, eBook Pricing!

2010-02-16T20:33:00.007-05:00

I had a whole post going about what's been going on for most of the month of January (and the last week of December), but then I started to take too long to make some obscure point and that one's just not getting published.

So the long absence has been down to a few things. Primarily some surgeries in the family, one planned and one not so much. Everyone's fine now, but as neither went off cleanly, it was harrowing for a few weeks there.

I've also attempted to revive some good habits, and start some new ones. Writing regularly being the former, and regular physical activity the latter. Mixed results for both, but the time required for both eats into blog time.

So as I don't like this thing to be a red frog, I've decided I should blog more often, but I've also decided that I shouldn't have to think each post, or even every third post has to be well-written or thought out or even very interesting to put up on here. (I can hear some of you asking how that's different in any way than what's come before and, man, that stings.) If 'good enough' is the new 'great', 'not that good' is the new 'good enough'. Right?

Anyway, onto the aforementioned 'not that good'.

So for Christmas my mom got one of the new e-book readers. The Sony Reader. It's pretty good. She had Lorrie Moore's "A Gate at the Stairs" loaded up on there, which helps, and reading through the first pages of that went fine. The device is intuitive and simple. The surface technology, the way the user interfaces with the machine, doesn't appear to have changed that much since they first came out but I think it has wider-ranging capabilities now than it used to. The sorts of files it can display for example. But it's lighter than a heavy book and, like my mom said, it's easier to find a comfortable position to read in when all you have to worry about is this little screen. So definite advantages.

Leaving aside for a moment whether these things will kill paper-based books, or even whether it's okay if they do, what about the price per ebook? The consumer-friendly price that Amazon set back when they introduced the Kindle was $9.99 for most new bestsellers, much less for classics (which are often free).

That appears to be changing. From the NYTimes:

"In the battle over the pricing of electronic books, publishers appear to have won the first round. The price of many new releases and best sellers is about to go up, to as much as $14.99 from $9.99."

Is a digital file of, say, Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" really worth $14.99? That price is essentially just $10 bucks off the price of an actual, holdable, lendable, throwable hardcover, and usually that discount comes out to a bit less when you consider how deeply some chain bookstores discount the stuff that really sells. To anyone reading who's got an e-reader, is the $14.99 per e-book a show-stopper or is it still fairly reasonable? Does anyone think this could be a feint, a trial balloon from the publisher and e-tailers to see how far buyers will go to load up their e-readers?

So how's the 'not that good' posting strategy going so far?

Cat v Dog, Winner: Dog. Cat and Robot v Dog? Winner: Cat and Robot.

2009-12-21T21:58:00.003-05:00

This is NOT a cat video blog. It is mostly a dead blog, but it is most assuredly NOT a cat video blog.

But here is a great cat video.

Wherein This Blogger Meets Stephen King

2009-11-19T08:30:00.001-05:00

To get a blue wristband, the wristband that guarantees your book gets signed, we had to send two emails at midnight on November 5th. Before the wife and I slept, she drafted two emails on two different Blackberries from two different email accounts. The alarm was set for 11:58 PM. Two minutes later, she pressed the 'Send' button on both, and we both went back to sleep. The next day we got confirmation: on Friday the 13th, we would see Stephen King. And he would sign our books.

The day arrives. I leave work an hour early and drive south to the Barnes & Noble in Buckhead.

The bookstore's in a strip mall, and when I get there the line has already wound its way from the double doors of the Barnes & Noble to the grocery store next door. I go inside, buy my copy of "Under the Dome", Mr. King's latest work, give my name to the man at the table, receive my blue wristband, and get in line outside. I don't have to wait but a couple minutes before the line moves inside.

We wait. The wife and I talk. Seven o'clock, the scheduled start for the signing comes and goes. I feel anxious. I still don't know what to say, if anything. How many hundreds of tall 32-year old dorks have gushed to King at book signings? Should I say something painfully earnest and instantly regretted, like "You're the reason I became a writer"? I wince at the thought. Why should he get the blame for that? I'm still considering when a cheer goes up in the children's section. The author has arrived. An excited murmur runs up the line; people who were sitting, now stand. The show is getting on the road.

The line is long but moves quickly, leading us through the sections of the bookstore few visit: True Crime, Sports, Car Maintenence. And with every bookshelf we pass, we see more of the set-up they've created for the author. A three-sided black curtain has been set at the top of a short set of stairs, with a big wooden table and padded chair placed inside the enclosure for the author working the pen. And then, as I make the turn around the Occult shelf, I see the man himself.

Gray and thin and bent over the book he's signing, Stephen King and I are officially in the same space. For the past 20+ years, I've watched him age and change with each new author photo, but here I am, seeing him with my own eyes. It is a strange experience. Seeing him there, the long face, the hair that will not thin or recede, the omnipresent eyeglasses, I feel I already know him, the way I'd feel if I saw someone I went to school with, and as I think this I am struck once again by the fundamental bizarreness of fame, the way it creates the illusion of a meaningful two-way relationship where no relationship exists at all. As evidence of this oddness: much of this post.

We get close. Getty Images is there to take some photos. Below is King posing with his novel (the 3rd longest of his career) for the Getty photographer. A short time after, I see him raise his arms to chest height and rotate his torso first right and then left in a stretch, settling in, limbering up.

The handlers of this event, some Barnes and Noble folks and some folks undoubtedly hired by the publisher, are the event's greasemen: they keep stuff moving. Requests for photos are knocked down pitilessly. Loquacious signees are subtly edged from the stage. This is a signing, they say with their stern faces and all-business body language, not a chance for you freaks to commune with your personal hero. Which is fine. We are, in this case, beggars, and thus cannot be choosers. King rarely does tours anymore, and never visits the Deep South, so we're all glad to take whatever's given.

We are next. I hand mine and my wife's books to the man in the suit and glasses and tell him, "This is my wife's book, and this is mine. He can sign both and she'll take a picture?" The man in the suit and glasses frowns and shakes his head. I can't quite hear what he says, but he's clearly not thrilled with my brazen and outrageous plan. All I know is I'm getting a picture of this, whether it stresses this guy out or not. The man in suit and glasses hands my books to the woman designated to open books and slide them over to King to be signed, but there's a fan still standing at the table, saying something to King or just watching him sign her books, I don't know, and then he's signing Peggy's book and the fan is still there.

The fan moves away finally and I step to the table. Stephen King is now signing my book.

Shit, say something, I think. He's almost done! I can't let this chance go by without saying a single thing, I'll be kicking myself for years. Literally kicking myself. I'll swing into black depressions whenever my mind chances upon the memory. He's done signing.

"So what should I read next?" I ask. "You got me into 'Edgar Sawtelle' and 'The Ruins', both of which were great, so what should I get into next?"

King closes my book, slides it over to the person designated to hand signed books to their owners, and sits back in his chair. "Ah," he says, mulling. King reads a lot, 80 books a year on average, many of them review copies of books yet to be published, sent to him by editors looking to get a blurb, so I imagine him trying to think of a book out now. He can't think of one. Instead, he says, "There's a book coming out next summer called 'The Bastard', by--" the author's name I didn't quite make out, but it sounded a bit like James Crowley, whose novel "Little,Big" I just finished and frickin loved.

"All right," I say. "I'll read that! Thanks!" He nods, puts pen to paper to sign the next book, I take the signed novels from the nice lady and head back down the stairs.

I've been to lots of book signings but this was the first and likely the only signing where I got to meet someone who's had a real appreciable influence on me. Meeting the writers of Sesame Street or Fred Rodgers himself (RIP) might be the few equivalents. I loved his books as a kid, and though my feelings about his work now are a bit more reserved than they once were, he's one of the few writers who made the transition with me from adolescence into adulthood. He's still good and worth reading and, I think for some books, re-reading. And more than just making scaring people with writing seem like the best possible job on earth to a kid who liked books and movies more than he liked being a kid in middle-school, his books helped shape my worldview. Anyone familiar with King books, or even the film adaptations of his books, knows that certain themes pop up again and again in his stories and, reading him as a kid, I soaked it all up without question: the military is untrustworthy, religious zealots are evil but wrap themselves up in 'good', life can end suddenly and violently and unfairly, etc. I still believe those things, so meeting the guy who had a hand in putting those ideas in my head so many years ago was a big deal for me. I'm glad he was a nice guy, didn't blow me off, and that he appears to be, more or less, exactly as he seems in his conversational notes to his readers and in his columns in Entertainment Weekly: friendly, human, engaged and serious about what he does, and always ready to recommend a book.

Mini-Review of "Men Who Stare at Goats", "Kick-Ass" Trailer's Up, New Blog to Check Out

2009-11-12T06:35:00.006-05:00

Three things, and three things real quick.

1.) "The Men Who Stare at Goats". Checked this out on Sunday night after an exhausting leaf blowing/raking session that afternoon. Not terribly impressed. I knew right off the bat it wasn't going to be as good as it appeared in the first trailer I saw for it (before the studio decided to start up with the ridiculous "No Goats, no Glory" ad campaign) because Ewan McGregor's voice-over is the first thing I heard. His voice-over comes on a lot, and Ewan struggling to keep an "American" accent consistent for an hour and a half is distracting and usually, not necessary to the film. The film starts strongly, but by the end, just runs out of juice. Also, I experienced one of the most temporally disorienting moments I've had coming out of a movie. I swore the movie had been at least 2 hours and some odd number of minutes, but a quick look at the clock on the drive home and I realized it had only been an hour and a half long. Ninety-four minutes to be exact, and I'm sure that's counting the credits. I'm going to chalk that up to the episodic and wandering quality of the movie. It felt like a literal adaptation of a good magazine piece. It just didn't work. I think I'd also put some of the blame on the director. According to Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke, Grant Heslov is one of Clooney's producing buddies. Producers shouldn't direct. When they do, you get this movie or one like the execrable "American Sweethearts."

2.) Kick-Ass trailer. This went up yesterday. Check it out here. Less good than I'd hoped, but I'm thinking I'll like the full trailer more. The comic (and what I'm hearing is the film is a pretty close adaptation of the comic) is real and dark and original. This teaser trailer only touches on some of the originality of Mark Millar's idea, but not much at all on the real or the dark. My guess is they'll show more of the arc of the film, including why this comic was so harrowing and a bit controversial.

3.) Finally, everybody needs to check out friend o' the blog Nathan Hines' new blog, located at hinesy.com. Nathan, as some of you may know, is an aspiring writer and business mogul who lives in Taiwan with his wife and two daughters. So, in addition to giving you the occasional taste of life in Taiwan (like the photo of a dude carrying his Schnauzer in a baby sling), he writes candidly about some of the conflicts one has to deal with when pursuing personal career goals while also being responsible to one's family. It's well-written and a good read, and worth checking in on.

Okay, and that's it.

A Brief Dispatch from the World of Fantasy Literature

2009-11-06T08:30:00.000-05:00

George R.R. Martin, arguably the best fantasy writer working today, has written four books in the Song of Ice and Fire series, the first of which, "A Game of Thrones", is already a classic of the genre. The thing that makes these books different from other similarly oriented fantasy novels, is that backroom politics and palace intrigue are the novels' focus. In the story, motivated players from all over the kingdom conspire and scheme, backstab allies and create unlikely alliances ("some friends become enemies, some enemies become friends") all to better their odds of toppling the current king and taking the throne for themselves. The good guys are complex but unapologetically good, and the bad guys are so goddamn evil you gnash your teeth when they appear in the story and you cheer when they get the sword in the ribs, or whatever death Martin's cooked up for them. Yeah, it's that kind of book. Which is not to say it's broad or simply written. The plotting Martin does here is as elaborate as you'll find anywhere, but he carries it off and doesn't make you see the difficulty in what he's done. This becomes less true as the books go on, but the first is a classic for a reason. And the end of the book, well -- it's memorable. I strongly recommend the book.

So, now that the glorious light that was the "Lord of the Rings" movies has begun to dim in the minds of geeks everywhere, and the next Guillermo Del Toro-directed Tolkein adaptations are still a couple years away, what fantasy awesomeness will arise to fill the gap?

Enter HBO's "Game of Thrones", filming in Ireland right now (very close to where DGG's "Your Highness" is filming, incidentally.) HBO's putting a lot of cash into the pilot, and word is they're likely to pick it up for a full first season. David Benioff is co-running the show, which is encouraging -- I liked the "25th Hour" and apparently his latest novel, "City of Thieves" was reviewed very favorably, so I think the likelihood of a faithful, well-adapted show is pretty good.

But the casting is where they've already gone so clearly right. The Daily Beast published an article about the growing geek interest in the project, and thrfeed.com put together an excellent page with all the characters accompanied by the photos of the actors portraying them. They nailed pretty much everyone. Sean Bean will play the patriarch, Eddard Stark, the reluctant noble from the northlands who's asked to travel to the capital city and serve as the king's consigliere. And then there's Peter Dinklage, who's been given the role of the crafty dwarf, Tyrion, the best character in the series. It's a pretty exciting cast and I can't wait for this to air.

Martin's been toiling away on the fifth book but, sadly, there's no light at the end of that tunnel -- he's been working on it for quite a long time, and now he's on-set in Ireland watching the filming, which probably means he's not working too hard on finishing the monstrosity he's created. I can hardly blame him. I'd rather watch great actors re-create scenes from my book than write new scenes too. Writing's hard.

Anyway, thought I'd give the uninitiated a glimpse of what geeks are going to be most excited about next.

The Comic Book Artist's Process

2009-11-05T08:30:00.000-05:00

So many stories to tell, so little time. Especially for the graphic novelist.

Comic book writer and artist Doug TenNapel is the focus of a short video about his process of making comics. In it he talks a bit about how the time allotted to us -- provided we're lucky enough to live all 75 years of the average US citizen's life span -- is far too short to make all the art we aspire to make, whether it's comics, movies, music, books or what have you. Which feels especially true to a serial procrastinator like myself. To speed himself up so he can put more of what's in his head on paper, he's made some adjustments, like inking 4 pages everyday, which is a hell of a lot, even for fast inkers. This does exact a toll on the quality of the inks, I would say, but he gets more done. He does also say he's more interested in telling a story than in making the image perfect, which results in a few examples of hurried-looking brushwork, at least in his 2005 Image comic, "Tommysaurus Rex", but certainly many more pages are done well than not.

There's also some interesting tidbits on brushwork, types of ink, and a few time lapses of TenNapel inking panels. I found it all pretty interesting.

"Avatar" Trailer Hits

2009-11-04T08:30:00.001-05:00

The new full "Avatar" trailer is up. I'm both more heartened by the fuller glimpse and a bit more disappointed. I'm heartened because I can see now that Cameron hasn't gone off the deep end and made "The Phantom Menace." The conventions of the sub-genre Cameron's staked out appear to have been followed closely, which should keep him out of abysmal failure territory. Which is also why I'm more disappointed than I was after just seeing the teaser. Not to be the cynic who's always looking for which movie the new movie most rips off, but, based on on this trailer, "Avatar" seems like a sci-fi remake of "Dances With Wolves."

The two movies aren't just similar because they both tell the story of a guy who sees how the natives he's supposed to fear/hate are not scary/evil, finds their simple way of life superior to his own and decides to protect it, it's similar because it appears to grab a lot more from Costner's movie than just the throughline. The loss or near-loss of a leg in service to the US Military (John Dunbar nearly loses his, but gets to keep his because of his heroic/suicidal diversion ride run - the paraplegic hero of this movie will have the use of his legs returned to him once he's proven himself in battle), the immersion into their primitive culture, the slow disillusionment with his own side, the fraught love story with the native girl, so on and so forth. That's a fine story, and Jim Cameron sure could have picked some worse plots to try out. But we've all seen it. "Dances" was kind of hokey in its way, but also really well done. So what about "Avatar" is going to improve on the original story? Cameron wrote it, so we know it's not going to be the snappy dialogue. The 3-D? The CG and motion-capture? Does anyone get excited about non-Pixar CG anymore?

Only the full movie will tell the tale. I hope Cameron makes me a believer.

The End of Disaster Movies or "California's going down!"

2009-10-06T08:18:00.000-04:00

Sometimes a movie can single-handedly kill an entire sub-genre. It can tackle it and subvert the conventions so slyly that the genre either has to change significantly or die. Or, in an attempt to make the "be-all-end-all" of a given sub-genre, a film can destroy that sub-genre.

Some comic geeks used to wonder if 'Watchmen' might be one of the former, rendering all future superhero movies obsolete or irrelevant. That didn't happen, but with "Scream" and the slasher movie sub-genre, it did. Because that film held up so many slasher-movie conventions as objects of mockery, there now exists a clear line demarcating all slasher movies that came before "Scream", and all of those after. A horror fan coming out of that film was justified in asking how anyone would make a slasher movie after 'Scream'. (Hollywood muddled through and out of this creative morass, the so-called "torture-porn" sub-genre became dominant).

All of that was the very long way around to say I think Roland Emmerich's "2012" will be the end of disaster movies for a long time, if not ever. And not because it's so subversive or because Emmerich clearly has so brilliantly wrung all the emotion there is to be wrung from disaster movies, but because he's obviously filmed, unintentionally, a parody of the disaster movie. Watch this 5-minute clip and tell me I'm wrong. Pure silliness.

All of that said, I'll be seeing this. If the disaster movie's going down, I'll be in the front row. I'm going to miss you man.

YouTube Compilation!

2009-09-29T19:49:00.003-04:00

Sorry I've been more than slack updating this thing. In what I hope to be the start of a fresh spate of new blog entries, here is a compilation of YouTube awesomeness over the years. It's damn fun to watch. So enjoy.

Josh Olson Will Not Read Your Screenplay

2009-09-11T07:23:00.003-04:00

Josh Olson, who adapted "A History of Violence" for the movies, got burned in one of those "Will you read my screenplay?" interactions that seem to happen a lot in Los Angeles. Mr. Olson has written a response to all other would-be Josh Olson-approachers, entitled, "No, I Will Not Read Your Fucking Screenplay." I like well-written and angry screeds, so if you like those too, go ahead and give a click and a read. I don't agree with everything he says in here, a lot of it's pretty darn harsh, but from the sound of it, he was asked for honesty, he was honest, and how he's the bad guy and he's rightfully pissed about it.

But here's the main paragraph for the time-challenged, where Olson describes how some non-writers, particularly film-industry aspirants, view writers and writing:

"Which brings us to an ugly truth about many aspiring screenwriters: They think that screenwriting doesn't actually require the ability to write, just the ability to come up with a cool story that would make a cool movie. Screenwriting is widely regarded as the easiest way to break into the movie business, because it doesn't require any kind of training, skill or equipment. Everybody can write, right? And because they believe that, they don't regard working screenwriters with any kind of real respect. They will hand you a piece of inept writing without a second thought, because you do not have to be a writer to be a screenwriter."

And then this nugget:

"It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't.

(By the way, here's a simple way to find out if you're a writer. If you disagree with that statement, you're not a writer. Because, you see, writers are also readers.)"

(Italics mine.)

A 4-Minute Time Lapse Movie That Will Keep You Unproductive for At Least Another 4 Minutes

2009-09-09T09:09:00.000-04:00

Saw this over on Andrew Sullivan's blog and he's right, it's hypnotic. The music, not so much. But it's fascinating to take in that trip in such a short amount of time.

It's amazing to think that a journey that was once a 50-50 life or death gamble that took month after arduous month (I know this because I used to play 'Oregon Trail'), can now be a.) done in a few days of driving (or 31 hours if you're nasty), or b.) depicted in its entirety in a 4-minute Web movie.

Lewis and Clarke's expedition ended 203 years ago. If they were able to see this video, they would obviously have ten varieties of puppies and then kill themselves as fast as their fingers could pull the triggers on their musket-guns. Two-hundred years in the future, which facet of our descendants' accepted workaday world would most deliciously blow their ancestors primitive early 21st century minds?

2009 Decatur Book Festival

2009-09-07T16:57:00.006-04:00

The wife and I went to the 2009 Decatur Book Festival on Saturday (for my entry about the 2006 Decatur Book Festival, click here). The Great Recession is making pretty much everything a little bit less good, and Georgia's biggest annual Book Festival did not escape the economic carnage unscathed. More on that later.

Though the Decatur Book Festival is a big event, with talks and panels and hours upon hours of emerging writers reading their work, for me the Festival consists of 3 things:

1.) The Antiquarian Book Fair.
2.) The tents.
3.) The big names.

1.) The Antiquarian Book Fair section of the festival, held each year in one of the ballrooms at the Holiday Inn in downtown Decatur, is a collection of booksellers from around the southeast who deal in rare books, some of which are signed by the authors of said rare books. There were fewer participants this year than in years past, which meant fewer booksellers selling rare, first edition novels (which is my thing). Worse than the decrease in the variety of books was the increase in their price. On a lot of 1st editions, prices had jumped 25% or more over last year for no apparent reason. There may be some complicated supply and demand forces at work here, but since the only thing I'm worse at than blogging is economics, I'll leave that for others to ponder. But the practical result of these unreasonable mark-ups was that I left the Holiday Inn empty-handed.

2.) The tents, which are open to anyone who can lay out the cash for the space, are the heart of the Festival. Which probably means the Book Festival needs triple-bypass surgery. The self-published cranks who populate the majority of these tents are pretty good at putting me in a bad mood, so we didn't spend much time there. McSweeney's, whose tent was a bright spot in the tent-sea last year with stacks and stacks of colorful and creatively-produced books for sale, had a tent again this year, though with many fewer books for sale, none of which tempted me to give Dave Eggers any cash. (The book I bought from them last year, "Arkansas", is still sitting on my shelf, unread. Soon!)

3.) There were a couple big name authors at the Festival this year, Charlaine Harris, author of the "True Blood" mystery series, being arguably the biggest (she was on-loan from DragonCon). But for me, there was only one writer visiting the Festival this year: Lee Child, creator of Jack Reacher. (He's the one in the photo who doesn't look like he's trying to creep his way into a photograph being taken of someone else.)

For a brief refresher on Reacher, click here for an old Inanities post.

In person, Child (his real name is Jim Grant) is tallish and looks in person exactly how he looks in photographs. His event was held in a church, so we all sat on cushioned pews while he spoke about how thrillers were the first genre, the best genre, and literary writers and readers shouldn't disrespect it. His talk was entertaining and low-key. He gave the impression of being not terribly overexercised about the difficulties of writing, and of viewing the process of writing a novel as being as much a commercial endeavor as a creative one. There are writers out there one suspects of being crassly market-minded, but would never cop to it in public, so it's vaguely unpleasant to hear this outlook admitted to so blithely. Guys like Clive Cussler and James Patterson, thriller writers who wrote very popular novels early in their careers, view their own books now as so much product. They subscribe to this view so completely that they're quite open about the inclusion of their name on a book's cover being more of a stamp of approval than a proclamation of authorship. Child has never done this, but gauging by his talk this weekend, it's conceivable he might one day decide to take this route. I went into the event thinking thrillers had, perhaps, been unjustly singled out as lesser than so-called "literary" books, but left thinking the thriller genre's bad reputation is likely deserved.

Outside, under the signing tent as he autographed my three Reacher books, I thanked him for writing about tall people. He laughed and said, "Yes, we're a much maligned minority. Not able to find clothes that fit, always having to bend down to look in mirrors." Seemed like a nice guy. And while some writers (often the "literary" ones) have stipulations at signing events that they will only sign multiple books if the new hardcover book is included among them (Ford), or will only sign one book and it has to be the new book (John Irving), Child told the crowd that he would sign everyone's books until there were no more books to sign.

All in all, not a bad year for the Decatur Book Festival. I hope the 2010 Decatur Book Festival occurs under far better economic circumstances.

"Avatar" Teaser is Up

2009-08-27T08:30:00.000-04:00

The trailer for "Avatar," Jim Cameron's long overdue follow-up to the blockbuster-against-which-all-others-are measured "Titanic", went up online not too long ago. The result is, um, unexpected. This first glimpse of footage isn't yawn-inducing, but for me it is kind of "Huh?"-inducing. Some of that is definitely on-purpose, but there are enough flying dragons ridden by blue archers to raise an eyebrow or two.

While it's nice to see some new non-documentary footage from the mind of Jim Cameron, it's a little dismaying to see that it appears to be cut from a film that's a weird hybrid of "Halo", "Phantom Menace", "Apocalypto" and "Ferngully" (the font for the film is definitely either from "Ferngully" or from the "Yanni: Live at Red Rocks" album). It is a teaser, so it's hard to take a whole lot from it other than the overall setting, the look of some of the alien environments, and a sense of the scope, but that's about it.

What is clear is that we've got Sam Worthington in what looks like a starring role. That's promising. He was the best thing about "T4" so I like the odds that he'll do an excellent job in this film, provided, that is, Cameron gives him some room to act as himself, and not in the form of one of the small-headed, spotted blue man-things that seem to be the focus of the movie.

From what I've heard, this film is one of those projects that directors sometimes pull from out of the back of a closet when they realize they can literally make any damn movie they want. "Fifth Element" was like that. I think the Star Wars prequels were basically like that. So that's cause for worry, but this is Little Jimmy Cameron we're talking about, the guy who made "Aliens" and "Terminator 2" and "The Abyss". It's difficult to imagine we'll see a bad movie from him.

But this teaser does make it slightly less difficult.

"District 9"

2009-08-25T08:30:00.000-04:00

(A review with spoilers.)

I saw "District 9" on Saturday, August 15th, and was pleasantly surprised to find a smart, original science fiction film exploring actual ideas at my local multiplex. Particularly after a few weekends of truly mindless toy-based movies.

I feel a certain pressure, all in my own head I'm sure, to really sound off about how great this movie is in a post. I think part of that comes from having a film exceed my expectations, part comes from my being as susceptible as the next guy to geek enthusiasm, and part of it is I think this film may be remembered long after this summer. But I'm not totally convinced on that last one yet, so I think restraint should be the order of the day.

I'm actually writing this on Monday, August 17th, but posting it today (Aug 25th) because I wanted to be sure there were at least two weekends between its release and my post because a.) I'd deal in spoilers, and wanted as many people to have seen the movie before the post went up as possible, and b.) I think even a non-spoiler-y review would give too much of the movie away. This movie, perhaps more than some others, benefits from low plot-awareness going in. So if you haven't seen it yet, click onto another website from your Favorites drop-down, because spoilers are a'comin'.

Quick background on the movie: The film's director, Peter Jackson-protege Neill Blomkamp, was slated to do a big-budget multi-studio film based on the "Halo" video games. That fell through when the studios got skittish about dumping $200 million into a movie whose hero wears an opaque face-shield for two hours. When the project died, Jackson and Blomkamp regrouped and poured all of their "Halo" energy and momentum into a new film. "District 9" is that film.

Set in Johannesburg, South Africa in present day, the film is shot in a quasi-documentary style and purports to document an eviction action on a slum settlement in that city. The evictors are a shady corpo-military company called MNU whose team, comprised of some civilians but more Blackwater-like mercenaries, are led by Wikus Van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) an affable bureaucrat who's been thrust into the role of team leader on the big day. The evictees are 7-foot tall aliens, derogatorily called "prawns" by their human neighbors, who came to Earth 20 years ago and have been penned into a squalid shantytown called "District 9" since. Much of the fun of these early sequences comes from seeing the human actors interact with the digital aliens without being awed by them. Wary, yes, afraid, yes, but not in any way amazed. These aliens are a part of the landscape for these South Africans, and on this day, just a problem to be dealt with.

During the raid, Wikus is exposed to an alien compound that makes him sick. Pretty soon he realizes what's happened: he's becoming one of them. The film proceeds to follow hapless, terrified Wikus as he attempts to fix what's wrong with him and chronicles his transformation from human to alien. Where "District 9" and Cronenberg's "The Fly" differ primarily is in how focused the story is on the transformation. "The Fly" pays loving attention to Seth Brundle's disgusting metamorphosis, but Blomkamp seems content to get the gross-out willies out of the way sooner, and doesn't linger much on them. But as with "The Fly", "District 9" lives and dies on how well the character of Wikus is written, and how well that character is played. Lucky for Blomkamp, Copley turns in a brilliant performance.

First, the actor. Sharlto Copley, who plays Wikus Van der Merwe, does excellent work. I loved that I'd never seen him before and the effect that lack of familiarity had on the way I experienced the movie. When he appeared on-screen in that first medium shot, I truly had no idea he was going to be the lead. I thought he would probably talk about the person we would come to know as the lead, but no way was this nebbish our guy. And I think it's awesome that it turned out he was. I wish more movies could pull this off, that studios would take a chance on more great first-time actors, but for now I'll just be grateful for the few times it does happen. I'm looking forward to seeing him in more films.

Second, and more importantly, the character. Wikus Van der Merwe is a classic Hollywood nice guy. Jack Lemmon's C.C. Baxter from "The Apartment" could have stood in for Wikus during these first scenes; he's chipper and charming, people at his work like him, he's even a bit incompetent, but incompetent in a nice way. But where other screenwriters might push away from the desk on issues of character with just that sketch, Blomkamp goes a bit further. Wikus is also a racist. The film does spend some time interviewing people who aren't racists (or maybe a terrestrialist is a better word), so tolerant people do exist in this world, but Wikus sure ain't one of them. He calls the aliens "prawns" as his default; his feelings of superiority are so built-in, he calls them prawns even when he needs their help. More than that, he doesn't care about their well-being. Sure, he doesn't like to see them slaughtered (like certain others at MNU), but watching them suffer a bit of abuse from some MNU shock troops doesn't bother him much. Nor does threatening to take away their kids if they don't submit to the eviction weigh much on his conscience. In Wikus's book, all of that's acceptable behavior.

But what happens to him over the course of the story changes him. Wikus has got an honest-to-God, old-time-screenwriting-101 character arc. I didn't realize how much I missed this stuff until I realized I'd been deprived of it for so long. Wikus changes. Physically, yes, but the physical change he endures forces him to see things in a new way. His outlook changes. And because Wikus resists that change so strenuously, it feels all the more authentic. Sometimes in movies, it feels like the character changes his stripes because the screenwriter's gotten to a certain page number in his script. But here it's well-done, gripping, and earned. I'd say that thematically, "District 9" shares as much in common with "Glory" as "The Fly" -- Colonel Shaw's journey from intolerance to respect for an unfairly maligned group follows a similar path, and both films reap some stirring moments as a result.

The effects were very good, but not breakthrough good. At least not visually. (They may have been so cheaply produced as to be landmark, but all I can go by is what's on-screen, and they looked as good as most CGI I've seen, and a bit better in a number of cases). But the aliens were well-done, particularly when the camera went into a close shot on their faces. Their eyes were alien enough so we wouldn't notice where the CG fell short, but human enough to let the CG render emotion, which they did surprisingly well. It's easy to see in the aliens of "District 9" how Blomkamp might have rendered the aliens of "Halo". I'd be happy to see Blomkamp get his turn at the plate for that project after all, though I'm not optimistic it will be him at the helm.

[Quick Geek Note: The 3rd act of this movie kicks the door open wide for a live-action, big-budget MechWarrior-type film. Much like all studios are scared witless about the idea of a superhero team-up movie, I think they've been similarly dismissive of a giant robot-suit movie, even though there's massive geek demand for it, both from anime fans and from nostalgiasts who remember stuff like "Voltron" fondly. These studio executives can only imagine these projects done wrong, and the careers that would end as a result. But with the climactic sequence that ends this film, Blomkamp has taken the stress out of green-lighting a mech warrior-type film. He balances the strength and gee-whiz dynamism of the robotic exoskeleton with Wikus's key emotional moments (which happen while inside the suit) so well, I think the studios will be turning something like "Johnny Appleseed" or any of the other countless giant-robot-suit Anime stories into a summer tentpole in the next 5 years. Prognostication over.]

Finally, I thought the social commentary of "District 9" was well-done and gave us a vision of an alternate-near-future that was as dystopian and disturbing as anything in "Blade Runner". I think the simple read of the social dynamics in "District 9" is that the film is a simple parable of how the whites in South Africa treated the blacks under the Apartheid regime, with the "prawns" standing in for the oppressed blacks, and humanity for the South African whites. Though it is that at it's core, "District 9" also levels its social critiques at other targets.

For instance, the true villain of the film is not a man but a corporation, MNU. MNU takes the worst aspects of massive, faceless, fingers-in-all-pots-type corporations like General Electric or Monsanto, and then gives them the quasi-military power of a BlackWater or a Halliburton. That the whole enterprise is run by the hero's father-in-law who just happens to have the moral code of Dr. Mengele, makes it clear what Blomkamp's opinion is of multinational corporations acting on the world stage. "District 9" also takes a fairly dim view of humanity, beyond the confines of racism. Rather than adhere to the high-minded theory that the presence of extra-terrestrials on Earth would cause a peace-explosion on this planet, Blomkamp presents, instead, a vision of that scenario where humankind's innate propensity towards violence and intolerance, particularly against those we believe to be different, wins out over those high-minded ideals. The result is we treat our alien visitors abominably. In the end, fear rules our behavior.

Anyway a good and impressive movie, and well worth a visit to the theater if you can swing it.

"Julie and Julia"

2009-08-20T08:30:00.000-04:00

Saw "Julie and Julia" at our new new theater here in Kennesaw, part of a chain called NCG, on Tuesday night last week, in a room crowded with moms and daughters.

Nora Ephron has made some excellent movies in an undervalued genre (comedy), and this is one of her better efforts. The film bounces back and forth between Julia Child's life as a developing cook in Paris, and the life of stymied writer Julie Powell who decides to start a blog in which she chronicles her efforts to make all 524 recipes in Child's book, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking", in 365 days. And though this film is ostensibly about two women finding their place in the world (I think I may have actually turned myself off from seeing this movie with that line), it's also about marriage, though highly idealized visions of marriage.

Paul Child (played by Stanley Tucci) is the sainted husband of Julia Child and, in the film, always knows the right thing to say, the most perfect gift to give, and never once loses his temper. Eric Powell (played by Chris Messina) is the sainted husband of Julie Powell, and he, too, always knows the right thing to say, the perfect gift to give, and though he does lose his temper once, it's because he doesn't like that she calls him a saint every now and again. So, in essence, he gets mad because he's too nice a guy. Oh, if only these were the problems married people had. But it's all fine, and it works because there's a specific light, comedic tone Ephron's patented over the years, and she's got it going here too.

But, thankfully, it's not ALL about wedded bliss. There's also a lot of food. Hopelessly outdated food, yes -- unfashionably hearty and reliant on thick cuts of beef and such -- but it's all so beautifully photographed, even the meat jellos look like they might be worth trying. "Julie and Julia" never makes food seem as marvelous or as important as it does in, say, "Big Night," or even "Ratatouille", it does its best and puts the aspics and the boeuf bourguignons at center stage enough to feel like you're watching a serious food movie.

Though I preferred the Julia Child scenes, I was never disappointed to return to Julie Powell's, which was a feat in and of itself considering how much fun it was to watch Meryl be Julia, and how much less fun, comparatively, it was to watch Amy Adams soldier through being Ephron's Meg Ryan 2.0, complete with the short haircut and the pouting and charming crying jags. Amy's a good actress, so she manages to make something interesting out of a fairly blandly written character. And as with any good film, you're left wanting a bit more, so I was disappointed I wouldn't get to see the scene where Meryl's Julia sees Dan Ackroyd's famous SNL sketch for the first time, (in real life, she loved the gory sketch so much she kept a VHS of it on her TV stand), or the scenes where she and Paul come in to a small public television studio in Boston, prepared as army generals, to make one of the first cooking shows ever put on the air. That would have been fun to watch, especially with Meryl and Stanley standing in for the Childs.

But, then again, as many biopics do tend to go on and on, maybe Ephron & Co. have struck upon the best telling of her life with this movie, grabbing up most, if not all, of the important moments of her life for half a movie.

Just a Taste of Crazy, Georgia-Style

2009-08-19T08:30:00.001-04:00

Take just a moment, won't you, to watch my elected Representative, none other than Phil Gingrey (R), take the assault rifle-carrying health care town hall opponents head-on on "Hardball."

Actually, watch Gingrey tell Chris Matthews he thinks it's A-OK to bring assault weapons to public political events the President is holding.

Yes, these people exist, and yes, I live among them.

Michael Vick: Totally Reformed

2009-08-18T08:15:00.002-04:00

If you happened to watch Michael Vick's interview on "60 Minutes" this past Sunday, then you may have been witness to the first stop in the most half-hearted redemption tour ever staged.

As you may remember, in 2007, Michael Vick's Virginia farm was raided. The Feds believed Vick, then the quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons as well as the farm's owner, was the proprietor of a dog-fighting ring. Dog fighting paraphernalia was seized, pit bulls were confiscated, and at least 6 dogs were exhumed from various shallow graves on the property. Vick was arrested. He lied to everyone about it. The NFL Commisioner, the owner of the Falcons, anyone watching TV who cared to listen. But it turned out dog-fighting was only the backdrop for the really sick stuff Vick did on that farm.

The indictment the Feds read out painted Vick to be the Papa Doc Duvalier of dog killers. Any way you can think of to kill a dog, Vick did it. Shot. Electrocuted. Drowned. Vick did it. Dog fighting is one thing -- well it's lots of things, but the kind of cold-blooded, personal and sadistic way Vick ended dogs' lives went well-beyond an illicit gambling operation. Goes well beyond questions of a "culture" that accepted dog fighting as a way of life. Hearing that indictment, people I knew who had rooted for the guy wondered what sort of person could do that. I was one of them. He went away for 18 months for a misdemeanor. He got out, and seemingly within minutes, he got a football contract with the Philadelphia Eagles. I wondered how an NFL team would explain their decision to hire Vick. Not that they couldn't or shouldn't, but I was curious to see how the battle to make it all okay was going to be fought.

His appearance on "60 Minutes" was to be the centerpiece of his "I'm sorry" tour, wherein he could persuade people that, like William Munny in "Unforgiven", he really "wasn't like that anymore." I came away deeply unconvinced. He seemed overly reliant on pre-written phrases ("put it all in perspective", "all because of the so-called culture"), cheap contrition ("I feel bad inside") and it all just seemed forced. In a clip they had of him speaking to a group on the evils of dog-fighting, he seemed to be struggling to remember the lines he was supposed to say.

In flashes though, I think his actual feelings made it through the stage-managed act. For instance, after James Brown details the ways Vick killed dogs, the aforementioned shooting, drowning, electrocuting, Vick sighs and says, "I don't know how many times I have to say it..." How about once? When asked why he cried at night, Vick didn't once mention dogs, or what he'd done to them. The overriding impression I get is that he's sorry he got caught. The interview showed not that he was sorry or changed, just that he could repeat the talking points his image management team told him to say.

Whether it's correct that, after serving his time, he should or should not be allowed to resume his football career is another issue. I'm of two minds on it myself. But what's at issue here is this: has Vick changed? Does he think that what he did to those animals was "disgusting," as he worded it in the interview? He says he has. But when he says he didn't feel disgust for what he'd done until the bars clanged shut his first night in jail, or when he continues to say he deeply regrets "the things I let go on," my inclination is to believe that he hasn't changed. He didn't let electrocuting a dog "go on", he actually did it himself. Same with the one he drowned, same with the ones he shot.

Here's the clip of the interview. Take a look and decide for yourself whether you think he's being sincere. Some of it I might put down to his not being a super bright guy, which is certainly not a crime, but my first read is that he isn't sorry yet. He still doesn't get it. He probably won't stage dog fights again, just because that would be beyond reckless, even for him, but I'm not at all persuaded he understands the reason for the public anger.

The whole sordid business has soured me on professional football. In the end, no matter how much the NFL Commissioner talks about how much he himself really loves dogs, no matter how often the Eagles owner says he expected a certain amount of "self hate" from Vick before he signed him, and no matter how awesome a mentoring job Tony Dungee does to make Vick a stellar human being, the fact that the whole charade is being perpetrated at all is because there are dollars yet to be made off of Vick playing football. Because this is true, people who want money will line up to make it off him, dog killer or no. It's something you know in your bones anyway: none of these guys is playing for the love of the game (who knows how many years its been since that was true), but to have the skin of civility ripped off the enterprise so brazenly is dispiriting.

One gets the feeling watching this play out, that it almost doesn't matter what Vick had done. If he was in playing shape when he got out of jail, someone who liked money would put a football in his hand and a fat check in his pocket, and Vick would go on "60 Minutes" and say how drunk driving is wrong, or domestic violence is wrong, or bar fighting that ends in death is wrong, and he'd play some football.

And you can be certain, no matter what he did, his image management team would make sure it was hard-hitting investigative reporter James Brown asking the questions.

HOUSE!

2009-07-28T08:30:00.002-04:00

And we're in! We are home-
owners. And, pictured to the left, the home we now own.

We closed on Thursday, painted two rooms Thursday and Friday night (among other things), and the move day was Saturday.

The movers arrived at 8am on the dot, loaded the contents of our apartment into their truck and dropped it all off at the new place by 2pm. Nice turnaround. Some scuffs and dings here and there, but that's moving.

We've made a nice dent in the unpacking, the faucet for the washing machine has been replaced, the cracked window panes replaced, the garage lights fixed, the phone and cable and internet all connected. There's still plenty to do, not least of which is to flush-mount these ceiling fans so I quit braining myself against them, but I think we've set a good pace.

Some things I like: Unlocking the door of my house and walking in. The quiet. The space.

Some things I don't like: I now have to mow a lawn. The low sinks, fans, and clearance on the garage doors, all of which demand I stoop, bow and duck. Also, the guy across the street who flies the Confederate flag off his porch on the weekends. Not sure we're going to hang out.
Those aspects aside, the wife and I are both pretty happy with it. Yay, house.

Charlie Brown: Monster

2009-07-18T17:06:00.004-04:00

A friend and former roommate of mine posted a link to this image from artist Tim O'Brien this past week on Ye Olde Facebook and I thought it was awesome and I wanted to post it up on the Inanities. This painting was done for a friend of the artist's who was having a show entitled "Monsters." This painting was O'Brien's entry. A counter-intuitive but perfectly appropriate selection, and beautifully executed. I love the wisp of hair and the ink-black eyes -- it's so faithful to the original but completely freakish.

if you're interested, this is a link to his blog, where O'Brien posts a lot of his magazine illustrations as well as a lot of cool inside dope on the ins and outs of being a fairly big-shot freelance illustrator. For instance, Time magazine called him up because they wanted a Sotomayor painting for the cover. He had 24 hours. He ended up doing three different paintings as options. Guy works fast.

In Big Move news, the apartment's getting empty of stuff and full of boxes. Closing's on Thursday, move day is 2 days later.

Anyway, I have a 75th and a 30th birthday party to attend this evening, and still a bit of packing to do, so I'll have to leave this blog entry with that.

"Public Enemies" Review Fail, Impending Home Ownership News

2009-07-14T08:30:00.000-04:00

I tried not long ago to write a post about Michael Mann's "Public Enemies," but I couldn't stay awake long enough to write more than a few cogent sentences about that movie. It was well-done but slow. And if you thought Depp's Wonka was a tough nut to crack, Depp's Dillinger is even more impenetrable. He loves his girlfriend (Marion Coutillard) at first sight and, well, that's, kinda it. That's his character. So I guess I'm not going to write about that movie. Sorry Michael Mann. I know you were checking the blog everyday to find out what I thought of your movie, but I can't give you more than what I wrote.

Two interesting things I discovered about Michael Mann while gathering some info for my failed "Public Enemies" post:

1.) Public Enemies is only Michael Mann's 10th feature film. Feels like he's done more, doesn't it?
2.) Early in his career, Mann directed "The Keep," a very cool horror movie from 1983. I had no idea. Now Mann and I are buds forever.

* * * *

In other news, the wife and I are very close to purchasing our first home. The inspection happened on Friday and only very minor issues were discovered. Some electrical outlets don't work, stuff like that. We sent our request for fixes this morning and the seller's already agreed to repair those few things, so we're on our way.

If all goes well, we'll close on the 23rd of this month, and, with luck, move right out of our apartment and into the house. Which would be quite something as we only put an offer on it 6 days ago.

The house is a green, sturdy beast sitting on a corner lot way back in an established neighborhood. Twenty-two years old, it has a good-sized front porch, a high-ish deck out back, and a pleasing copse of shade trees clustered near the front steps. If (knock wood) all goes to plan, we'll be the proud owners of a house in Kennesaw, Georgia. It's a good house and we're pretty excited about it.

So if there's a drought of posts in the next few weeks, it won't be because I'm super lazy, which is usually why there's a drought of posts, but because we'll be getting up out of our apartment and into a house. The Inanities will limp on!

"Drood"

2009-07-02T08:30:00.001-04:00

You know it's been a while since I wrote a post that pretty much no one who frequents this thing would have any interest in. I think it's about time I put up one of those.

In other words, time for a book post. This time I'll be blathering about Dan Simmons' latest horror novel, "Drood", the follow-up to his popular horror novel "The Terror."

One thing "The Terror" and "Drood" have in common is that they both had the good fortune to be published by Little, Brown and Company, who have in their employ one of the best inside dust-jacket-flap copy writers I've encountered. For those of you who've read and enjoyed a scary book, I defy you to read this copy, and not instantly want to read page one of "Drood". I'd almost rather read a book by this guy/gal than the book her/her flap-writing goaded me into reading.

Well I picked "Drood" off the circular bestseller table at B&N, read the inside flap, promptly laid that 780 pg mother down on the counter, plunked down my Chase card and took it home. It was a while before I finished it as I was at the time deeply in the throes of torturing myself with a modern classic, and knew if I started something fun I'd never pick up the classic again. But as soon as I got done with that, I got right into "Drood" and finished it middle of last month. I'm sad to say I was left baffled and disappointed by the book.

The story is set in the mid-late 1800's, when Charles Dickens has already published his most famous works and is at the peak of his fame and creative powers. His friend, novelist Wilkie Collins, is the narrator of this tale, and it starts with Wilkie relating to the reader the details, as told to him by Dickens, of the train crash (referred to throughout the novel as "the Staplehurst disaster") that very nearly killed Dickens. It is in the gruesome aftermath of this accident that Dickens first meets the mysterious Drood, a pale, scarred, eyelid-less ghoul in a top hat who seems to glide rather than walk. Dickens relates how Drood seemed to attend to those still dying from their injuries, but all who were visited by him, died minutes later. Once home in London and ostensibly safe, Dickens enlists friend Wilkie to track down Drood and get a better sense of the creature.

This first section of the novel is gripping. Here Simmons is able to conjure a pervasive feeling of dread while grossly magnifying the excesses of the Victorian era into a hellscape worthy of Bosch. We visit London slums so dangerous only an armed policeman can lead a person safely through. Once through, however, we discover an even more dangerous slum beyond where even armed policemen won't dare go. This is good stuff. Opium dens, wild children, Egyptian fiends all abound in a place called Undertown, and so long as Drood remains the focus of the book, Simmons can't miss.

Unfortunately, Simmons isn't so interested in Drood as that darn flap copy might lead you to believe. Once the hunt for Drood (at least the hunt as we understand it) ends with the narrator alone in the lightless sewers, no wiser than he was when he'd first descended, stumbling blind looking for the surface, the novel enters a more psychological phase. Here Simmons asks the reader to kindly forget about that mysterious and frightening Drood fellow, whose name doubles as the title of the doorstop you're holding, and let us take a few hundred pages to see what makes this laudanum-addicted narrator/novelist Wilkie Collins tick.

This new mystery isn't quite so compelling.

Though Wilkie Collins is interesting enough as a character, he is an addict, and if anyone reading's ever seen an episode of "Intervention," you know how strong the urge can be to reach through the screen and slap an addict. The character of Wilkie Collins often provokes a similar reaction. Self-interested, self-involved, rarely bothered by his conscience (which, while weak, does exist) and worn down to not much at all by his jealousy of Dicken's professional success, Wilkie's an unpleasant person. As the novel progresses there are Drood interludes which are effective and bring the book back on track, but none can be entirely believed, experienced as they are by a man perpetually high on opium. As time passes, Wilkie's bad traits seem to get worse, which may or may not be a sign of an infernal interference in Wilkie's mind, though Simmons does not answer this question with any certainty. And even more than putting the reader in the hands of an increasingly loathesome (and unreliable) narrator, it is this unresolved quality of the book that may be its primary flaw.

Throughout "Drood", Simmons devises a series of hair-raising mysteries. What exactly IS the thing in the servants' stairwell in Wilkie's estate? Who is this creepy doppelganger Wilkie dubs "the Other Wilkie" that haunts him and sometimes writes whole pages of his novels for him? And though the answers may reside somewhere in the novel's 750 pages, the meandering writing and almost compulsively repetitive prose stylings (certain phrases, like "the Staplehurst disaster" for example, occur again and again and again -- referring to it often, he never calls that key incident anything else), don't indicate a literary depth best plumbed by multiple readings. And worst of all, the key mysteries of this novel are, if this reader's accurately comprehended the text, essentially dashed aside in a shocking, unsatisfactory confession that serves as the story's climax without firmly tying up the biggest loose end of the whole story. The denouement only serves to leave other, lesser mysteries similarly unresolved.

A book critic wrote of "Drood" that an excellent thriller lived somewhere inside of it; 3 or 400 pages cut out and reworked could result in something more worthy. Though I know that by this he means that if Simmons had focused on Drood and Dickens and Wilkie's hunt for him through the "Great Oven" of London, "Drood" would have been much improved. But given the tone-deaf third act of this book, I'm not at all confident that even if Little, Brown had handed the two-shoebox manuscript back to Simmons with the direction to whittle mercilessly, he wouldn't have found a different way to underwhelm with the ending. First half = good times. Second half = not worth the time. Which is too bad, as the premise for this book is killer and should have produced a much sharper thriller.

New Leviathan Computer, and a New Passel of Movie Reviews

2009-06-30T08:30:00.001-04:00

I finally got a new computer over the weekend, and this is what I picked up. That's right. I've finally come over to the other side.

So far so good. The screen is frickin' giant, for one which is good. But at 24" I kind of have to strain my neck to look up at it (and that's not really an exaggeration), but it's bright and crisp and lovely. All day at work, I wanted to be home with it.

But anyway, so I've got a blog-enabler again, and so here I am again.

I've seen three movies since my last entry, so I thought I'd give each a brief run down and call it a post.

1.) Year One. The thing that excited me most about this one was the fact that Harold Ramis directed it. As you know, he did Groundhog Day, a modern classic and one of those rare comedies that hasn't aged over the years. But I forgot that for every Groundhog Day, there are a few not-so-great movies, like, say, Multiplicity. No one's really thinking too much about Multiplicity these days, and I'm thinking in a couple weeks, no one's going to be thinking too much about Year One. Wasn't really bad. But it didn't try for very much. Mucho Libre, I thought, was a very bad comedy, but I think it only attained 'really bad' because it was really trying for something grander, which is darn admirable. Year One isn't aiming for anything higher than the comic stupidity of Caveman, that Ringo Starr starrer. I actually saw Caveman as a double feature at a Texas drive-in in 1981. They'd paired it with Clash of the Titans , so it was oddly fitting I'd see another goofball comedy about prehistoric hijinx at another drive-in theater 28 years later.

Year One stars Jack Black and Michael Cera as a hunter and gatherer respectively, who embark for some reason (not sure why because I was visiting the facilities when this was explained) onto a search for some dumb thing or another. Not worth recounting. But Oliver Platt is a genius in this movie. Who knew that guy was so damn funny? Not sure it's worth sitting through the rest to see how funny Platt is, but if you'd rather, you can take my word for it.

2.) Land of the Lost. This was the 2nd bill in our double feature. For me, much funnier than Year One. Will Farrell's got some hilarious moments in it (like when he mouths the words "F**k you" to their ape friend Chaka, for whom he has a weird, pathological hatred for), and Danny's given some room in this movie to be really funny, but if anything was holding this movie back, it was that it was based on a TV show that no one actually had a whole lot of nostalgia for in the first place. Probably because it wasn't a very good show. So, kudos to Brad Sieberling and the writers and Will and Danny and the British chick who seemed very nice for making a decent movie out of some sub-par source material. (Special note: Be sure to keep an eye out for a Ben Best cameo.)

3.) Away We Go. Was really not looking forward to this one, but wifey wanted to go and Lord knows I deserve to get dragged to some movies for all the movies I drag her to, so away we went to Away We Go! (And there you have my Gene Shalit moment. No more of those, I promise.) Actually, very good. Written by McSweeney's kingpin and (sigh) pretty good writer Dave Eggers and his wife, also-novelist Vendela Vida, and directed by Sam Mendes, Away We Go is either a.) a movie that is trying very hard to be a generation-defining movie, or b.) a movie that actually kind of defines a generation. Or at least part of it. Still not sure on that point, but I'm having some trouble kicking it out of my head.

John Krazinski and Maya Rudolph play Burt Farlander and Verona de Tessant, a young couple with a baby on the way. They live in a ramshackle house out near Burt's parents (in what looks like Wyoming or somesuch) and both work from home. He sells insurance over the phone, and she's a medical illustrator. When Burt's parents (a very funny Catherine O'Hara and Jeff Daniels) decide to forego the whole grandparent thing and move to Antwerp for 2 years, Burt and Verona find themselves unmoored to any particular geographical location. They decide to shop around for a new city to put down roots and this search provides the basic structure of the film. They visit friends and relatives all over the country and so the film gets chopped into little vignettes about where other young- thirty-somethings find themselves 9 years into the 21st century. The film becomes a kind of examination of different types and intensities of unhappiness, and what feel like basic truths are uncovered but without seeming corny, self-righteous or preachy. Not an easy trick. The secondary roles are done uniformly well by actors like Allison Janney and Jim Gaffigan and Paul Schneider (who's just plain good in this), and the tone, which is so important a part of this movie, hits that quirky, real, bittersweet funny/sad sweet spot that a lot of movies are looking to hit but often don't.

So, in other words, pretty darn good. Mark that one a recommend.

Since I'm not so good with photos yet on this thing, I'll just stick with the one computer image at the top and call it a night.

A Photo From the Beach

2009-06-11T21:51:00.005-04:00

To make up for my photo-free reference to my beach vacation in yesterday's post, I'm including a photo my brother took of me (and my dad in the bg) that captures some of the feel of the week. Sitting and reading was the order of the day, which suited me fine.

If you look, you can see on my right arm the weird streak of paleness shooting through sunburn. I had a few of those. I've never tanned great, but I never used to tan in splotches and streaks. Weird.

The book my dad's reading is "Gone Tomorrow" by Lee Child (the latest Jack Reacher novel, I'd finished it the day before), and I'm reading "The End of Overeating" by David Kessler. I was hoping I'd find directions on how to get rid of the also-pictured gut without exerting a single foot-pound of effort or eating so much as a calorie less. Alas, no luck.

Back from Vacation! Movie Reviews! No Accompanying Photos!

2009-06-10T22:46:00.002-04:00

Hey y'all. Sorry for the totally weak blog action of late. I feel like I just put that "Road" post up and it's actually been about a month. I should just put dead blog on this thing and save my dignity, but I'll keep on keepin' on.

From May 30th to June 7th I was in Florida with my family for a big ole vacation. No email or cell phone or Facebook or internet at all for a week. Just sitting in a camp chair under an umbrella that sometimes launch out of the sand and fly, reading new Jack Reacher, looking up periodically to confirm the Gulf was still there, and taking ladylike sips from canned Corona Lights (because they won't let you take bottles to the beach, understandably). I've never really been on a proper, take-time-off-work vacation before, and it was pleasant and relaxing and all of that, but I had to concentrate to keep from turning it into a sad countdown to a return to the workaday. But I think I did all right on that score.

I've seen a shitload of movies since last I posted. Here's a rundown:

1.) Star Trek. I think JJ Abrams is trying very hard to be the next Steven Spielberg. I wouldn't say he's got the chops to do it, I don't see that yet, but he's sure got Stevie's ambition. This movie was almost disturbingly tailored for the broadest possible audience. Fuzzy sidekicks, slapstick humor at every turn, even Tyler Perry was thrown into this thing to give it the best possible chance to succeed at the box office. And even with all of that calculated mainstream profit-driven thought pushing its way into this movie, it works. They made a fun movie that, to my mind, is as fun and mindless as Star Trek IV was, and Star Trek IV was pretty good. I'm not sure I'm into the whole alternate Trek universe thing Abrams started here, but the actors are all appealing and I'm interested to see sequels, so I guess everyone's happy. Except the haters.

2.) Terminator 4: Salvation. For the first 2/3rd of this movie, Terminator 4 rocks it as hard as T2 ever did. It even brought JD Salinger out of seclusion! The shots! Camera locked on John Connor from ground, to helicopter, to airborne helicopter, to downed helicopter, no cuts. The sequence! You know the one I mean. The one that begins with the giant terminator attack on the gas station hideout and ends with Marcus scudding across the surface of the canyon river. That was good enough to make me forgive McG a.) his name, and b.) Charlie's Angels 2. Unfortunately, after John Connor and his black friend successfully field test the signal on the big hunter-killer, the screenwriters apparently suffered massive head-trauma but kept writing through the pain. McG, clearly not knowing his writers had been close to blacking out with life-threatening concussions when they wrote the 3rd act, just shot what had been written. He's a director, not a writer! How was he supposed to know the ending was so bad? And so, in the dumb 3rd act, John Connor walks into SkyNet city without a.) a single problem, or b.) a moment's suspicion about how he's walking into SkyNet city without a single problem. Worse than all of that, it just gets boring and lets the audience out of the story too much. But even with the weak ending, T4 is still a worthy addition to what I thought was a dead saga, and makes me interested to see more.

3.) Up. What a downer! An uplifting animated film about an old man coming to grips with the death of his wife? And his own impending death? What? Kudos to Pixar for keeping it different, and not letting any received wisdom about what an animated movie can or should be dictate which films they make, but this movie was sad, y'all! But besides that, Up is more of the same Pixar genius. Brilliant animation, brilliant shot selection, brilliantly drawn characters. There were some moments where whimsy crossed the line into sheer ludicrousness (dogs flying biplanes?), but I'm just not especially enthusiastic about lump-in-the-throat movies made by people who've set out to get people to cry, and I kind of think they did with this movie, more than any other Pixar movie to date. But even with all that said, I'm not sure I'd want them to have changed any of that stuff. It was all very well done, but just not what I'm down for these days. Or should I say... up for?

4.) Drag Me to Hell. Stephen King used to run-down a spiral of diminishing returns when writing horror novels. First, if you can get it, go for terror. If you can't get that, try for horror. If not that, go for a cheap shock. And if you can't get any of that, "go for the gross out." I think Sam Raimi knew right off the bat he wasn't going to get any of the first three, probably had no intention of attempting to get them, and focused his energy on the gross out. He doesn't do too badly on that score, but it's kind of a low bar he set for himself. Drag me to Hell was more of a diverting exercise -- a chance for Raimi to show himself and his fans that 3 Spider Man movies hadn't killed the Evil Dead in him -- than a real honest-to-God horror film. Things I liked: 1.) Allison Lohman. Easy on the eyes. 2.) The cinematography. The colors were really popping and it managed to capture some of that LA-sunlight quality that seems to elude other filmmakers. 3.) the last 10 seconds. Not in a gut-level way -- it's not emotionally satisfying -- but intellectually it makes sense. I wish the set up for the ending hadn't been so obvious though.

5.) The Hangover. Funny stuff. I never felt I was travelling on the same current of humor as this movie was, but it had a good number of laughs. I liked the Rain Man shot a lot, I liked the shot in the taser class where the kid gets up to tase Zach and it goes into slow-mo, and I liked the easy comraderie. The tone was good too, which is an easy thing to discount but always hard to get right. And the photo montage at the end is, of course, genius. But I'm not thinking right now that this is an amazing comedy, just a really competent one.

I'd add some photos to pretty this beast up, but it's late, and the Man demands I return to work tomorrow.

"The Road" Trailer Hits

2009-05-14T23:05:00.002-04:00

Not a great trailer, but gets the job done. For one, I don't really like the "Day After Tomorrow" vibe at the start of this thing. McCarthy spent about a sentence dealing with the whys and wherefores of the end of civilization, but the trailer makes those concerns seem paramount. Comes off looking cheap and over-CG'd. The delay in getting this into theaters also worries me a bit. But there are enough hints that the dread and terror and hope McCarthy conjured so effortlessly in the novel made it into the movie that I'm excited about this one.

"The IMAX Experience" is Not IMAX

2009-05-13T09:26:00.000-04:00

I GOT INTO A CONVERSATION with one of my 3 bosses at work back in March and told him I was going to see "Watchmen" in IMAX. I was driving about an hour from where I live to see it on the big screen.

He said, "I think there's an IMAX right up here." He told me about the local AMC theater that now, apparently, had IMAX and it was, in fact, much closer than the one I'd been driving to. I had my doubts about my boss's claims. When they installed the IMAX projector into the Mall of Georgia Regal theater up in Buford, GA, many years ago, it made the front page of the Atlanta Journal & Constitution because they'd had to lower it into place with the aid of a helicopter because it's e-goddamn-normous. (And also not a lot of interesting things happen in Atlanta, despite what you may have heard.) I hadn't heard of anything like a big-time installation of and IMAX projector happening out near where I work.

This morning, my boss comes up to my cube and says: "You know that theater over by the mall? It does have IMAX. My wife went into the Joann's that's right next to the theater, (I don't know what they do [at Joann's] -- I guess they make things?) Anyway, I went in and asked if they had IMAX there and they said, yes they did."

I was still dubious, but if an employee said they had IMAX, maybe they did. But the IMAX theater was just ... hidden somehow. When there's an IMAX theater in a multiplex you damn well know it because the screen is, like the projector, e-goddamn-normous.

Well, now I know what the disconnect is.

IMAX is now putting their brand on NOT-IMAX screenings. Here's a helpful comparison. The big rectangle is the size of an actual IMAX screen, the kind I drive an hour to watch movies on. The smaller one is the size of the screen AMC and Regal and IMAX are saying provide "The IMAX Experience":

As you can see, it's total bullshit. A scam.

Aziz Ansari, the guy who plays the smarmy middle eastern dude on the new NBC comedy "Parks and Recreation" (alongside NCSA SOF alum Paul Schneider), got tricked into seeing a faux-IMAX movie ("Star Trek") and paying regular-IMAX prices. He blogged about it.

I'm a big supporter of IMAX, I think the actual IMAX experience could establish a new foundation for moviegoing that could keep theaters in business and profitable for another 50 years -- but this diluting of the brand by going after unsophisticated moviegoers is low, completely needless, and will ultimately backfire.

Anyway, something to look out for and tell others about.

Latest SNL Digital Short

2009-05-12T08:30:00.000-04:00

This was kind of gross, but also kind of funny. Not so funny that I'm banging down people's doors trying to get them to watch it, but funny enough to try out Hulu's embed functionality for shits and gigs.

(Also: From this clip, it is now indisputable: Susan Sarandon has de-aged 4 years since her last movie. Brilliant plastic surgeon or pact with the devil?)

In the Tank

2009-05-06T10:00:00.000-04:00

Man do I like our President.

When I'm feeling more ambitious than I do right now, I'll write up a really insight-free report card for our President in his first 100+ days, with plenty o' bloviation on the policy choices of this very young administration. But having worked like crazy during many of those 100 days and, thusly unable to devote as much attention to politics as I did during my unemployed days (or even my non-comic-drawing days), I'm just enjoying sitting back and watching this guy work: dazzling during press conferences, reversing dumbshit policies enacted over the last 8 years with a stroke of the pen, and, every now and again, really seeming to enjoy being President.

A story like this is a good example: Obama and Biden heading down to a local burger joint. In this case, it's a place called Ray's Hell Burger in Arlington, Virginia.

I'm not so naive as to think Obama doesn't know how appealingly down-to-Earth this photo-op makes him look (which, from an image-management point of view, probably helps tamp down on feelings in some quarters that he's too aloof or "arrogant"), or that it wasn't a response to last weekend's Republicans-Strategize-at-a-Pizzaria photo op. But I'm also not so cynical as to think the man a.) doesn't like a good burger as much as the next guy, or b.) doesn't think that going to a neighborhood burger joint in a presidential motorcade makes the experience that much cooler.

Anyway, I enjoyed this "news" story and thought I'd share.

Briefly

2009-05-05T21:19:00.004-04:00

Quentin Tarantino loves Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns". From the New York Times Magazine article: "I am a big fan of ‘‘Returns.’’ I’m working on what is now a 20-page review of that movie, and I’m not done yet. "

Who doesn't love a really really long movie review?

Also: this makes me want to rewatch that movie.

Stephen King News, in Brief

2009-05-05T08:30:00.001-04:00

Three tidbits of Stephen King news, listed in descending order of likely interest from this blog's readers. All of my news comes from this site.

1.) When "Lost" wraps up, (which I think happens at the end of next season), J.J. Abrams (director of Cloverfield, Star Trek) and Damon Lindelof aim to begin work on bringing Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" series to the big screen. Seven books... seven movies?

2.) This Sunday's "Family Guy" is devoted to Stephen King. This from the network's description:

Sunday, May 10
FAMILY GUY (9:00-9:30 PM ET/PT) – “Three Kings” – Season Finale

"After Peter discovers the writing of Stephen King, he imagines his family and friends in three of King’s most famous works. First, Peter, Quagmire, Cleveland and Joe – as 12-year-olds – travel along a railroad track on a journey of self-discovery narrated by Richard Dreyfuss (guest-voicing as himself). Second, Brian is injured in a bad car crash only to be “rescued” by his “number one fan,” Stewie. Finally, Cleveland and Peter become fast friends in prison."

"Family Guy"'s gotten better (and weirder) each season (culminating in the episode where Peter discovers the joys of the song "The Bird's the Word" -- this episode very nearly killed me), so I'm really looking forward to this one. The show's not afraid to make an obscure cultural reference, so it'll be interesting to see how "inside" McFarlane gets with his King jokes.

3.) November sees the release of King's newest novel entitled "Under the Dome," the description of which sounds as if it were inspired by 2008's "The Simpson's Movie":

On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester’s Mills, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener’s hand is severed as “the dome” comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when—or if—it will go away.

Dale Barbara, Iraq vet and now a short-order cook, finds himself teamed with a few intrepid citizens—town newspaper owner Julia Shumway, a physician’s assistant at the hospital, a select-woman, and three brave kids. Against them stands Big Jim Rennie, a politician who will stop at nothing—even murder—to hold the reins of power, and his son, who is keeping a horrible secret in a dark pantry. But their main adversary is the Dome itself. Because time isn’t just short. It’s running out.

This thing's 1,120 pages and comes out November 20th.

"X-Men Origins: Wolverine"

2009-05-04T08:30:00.001-04:00

I saw "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" on Friday night, and though it wasn't the worst summer movie I've seen, it was the worst comic-book movie I've seen. I've been a big Wolverine fan since I started reading comics, but this movie made me forget what I liked so much about his character.

He's a guy with claws that can cut through anything, he's older than dirt but still looks like a ripped 40-year old, and he can never die. Somehow this movie managed to make all of that seem really boring. Part of that might have been because in the first part of the movie, when he's teamed up with his brother, Victor (aka Sabretooth, played by a genuinely menacing Liev Schrieber) and a bunch of other mutants, Wolverine is easily the most useless member of the team. He's got frickin' BONE claws. What's a guy going to do with those? Stab a guy? Isn't a guy with two big knives instantly as qualified as Logan to be a death-dealer?

Wolverine never gets too much cooler than a fairly ineffectual guy with 6 jagged compound fractures. Hugh Jackman does what he can to keep the character he originated interesting (and by the way Wolverine was 10 times cooler in his first scene in "X-Men" then he is in this whole movie), but isn't helped by a muddled, goofy script by David Benioff and Skip Woods. But if you're a motivated director, you can make a shite script look really cool if you know how to shoot action scenes and understand how special effects work. Unfortunately, Director Gavin Woods is so-so to not-very-good on action, but absolutely clueless with special effects. I think there's a whole reel in this movie that could serve as a clinic in how NOT to do green screen work.

"Wolverine" suffers from the same guiding philosophy as last year's "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull": CG makes everything better. The result was lots of fakey effects and glaringly bad green screen work. But bad as "Crystal Skull" was on this score, "Wolverine" makes "Crystal Skull" seem like "Aguierre: The Wrath of God." People want to see real people doing real things in real places, but there's precious little of that in "Wolverine." Even Logan's CLAWS are digital -- worse, they look like digital claws. And because the special effects are so bad, a $140 million dollar movie looks like it cost half that much.

I think Gavin Hood, like a lot of non-comic-reading folks, doesn't "get" Wolverine, and, I suspect, never cared about doing a "Wolverine" movie right. The results, sadly, speak for themselves.

But since it made $87 million over the weekend, Fox will wrongly view Hood's film as a success, (just as they will wrongly view Snyder's "Watchmen" a failure), Hood will get to direct/ruin another big-budget studio film, and Fox will likely foist more sub-par "X-Men Origins" movies on filmgoers. If many more of these disappointing comic-book films are released, I suspect the current trend of comic-book-to-film adaptations will fizzle out before some of the great properties have been translated to the silver screen.

New Saturn Images; Also: Shapes and Their Crushing Recurrence

2009-04-29T11:00:00.000-04:00

Some new images of Saturn and its surrounding moons taken by Cassini were released recently and they're pretty stunning. The Boston Globe's got a crisp, nicely captioned set of photos that kind of make astronomy cool again. Well, for a few seconds and then it gets nerdy again.

The image to the right is from Saturn's "high north" and it was taken from a distance of 336,000 miles. Each pixel represents 18 miles (let that blow your mind for a second).

A lot of the images are powerful but this one really struck me. Looking closely at it, all the roiling storms on the surface of the planet, I thought it looked a bit like this photo:

I'm just continually struck by how the same patterns and shapes show up again and again and again on a sliding scale, all the way from the tiniest speck of atomic matter, to a nautilus shell, to the most macro view of the entire universe. And here the same spiral shapes showing up here on the surface of gas giant Saturn. Something about that brutal consistency absolutely everywhere is both reassuring and kind of deflating.

In our deepest explorations of space, will we ever find the legendary schlazz'shlorg shape? Or just more of these spirals?

Yeah. More spirals.

Don't Let Ben Linus Read to Your Children

2009-04-28T08:30:00.000-04:00

Michael Emerson plays Ben Linus on "Lost". Ben's the 2nd coolest character on the show, right behind John Locke, and he's been getting more and more airtime since he was introduced in season 2 because the producers know genius when they see it.

The reason he's cool, even though the show he's on is getting, sadly, less cool, is because he seems to know what's going on on the island even though no one who's been watching the show for the last 76 years does. We all envy him because he probably doesn't have to watch any more episodes to find out what the eff is going on.

More than that though, I like Michael Emerson because JJ Abrams and the "Lost" crew wrote a great, mysterious, continually-surprising character, and Emerson nails the role every week. Part of what makes him an actor you can't help but watch is his brilliant use of voice. It raises creepy to new levels.

And he uses that voice to great effect for this awesome bit on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon", reading a children's rhyme in his patented creepy-genius voice. If they were casting "Silence of the Lambs" right now, I guarantee this guy would be in the lead for Lecter. Anyway, good stuff. Made me laugh.

"Watchmen" [2009]

2009-04-27T09:00:00.000-04:00

[Spoilers below.]

It’s been more than a month since the film adaptation of “Watchmen” came out (Mar. 6^th), and I’m still thinking about it. The film, adapted from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons graphic novel of the same name, is compelling and thought-provoking in the same ways the comic was, but the movie’s still banging around inside my head for other reasons. One reason in particular, and I wasn't expecting this, is the question is raised for me: When adapting a story into film, how faithful is too faithful?

Starting out with that question might make it seem I was disappointed with the movie, but I loved this thing. I think director Zach Snyder did an incredible job adapting what a lot of people thought was not actually filmable. When he wasn’t filming the comic, panel by panel, he was expanding the scenes, letting them breathe. The first scene, where a shadowy assassin murders the Comedian, was not depicted in the comic as it happened, but visited only in glimpses of a past event. Snyder lets us see it, and he’s smart to do it. The murder of the Comedian is a grabber.

Now I loved every frame of “The Dark Knight”, but I think after “Watchmen,” we have to give credit to Snyder – he directs fight scenes exceptionally well. As a contrast, take Christopher Nolan's approach to superhero fight scenes. Where Nolan seems reticent about showing a guy in a superhero outfit fighting, Snyder films the two combatants in the first scene (and a few others) full frame, no quick mid-punch edits, with the actors placed far enough from the camera so we can see one fighter strike, and the other dodge. Snyder allows the actors to communicate something about their characters through the fight choreography. First, we see that these guys are definitely superheroes, or as much like superheroes as the "Watchmen" world allows two non-irradiated/disintegrated men to be. Their fists land like hammer strikes and move in blurs. The shadowy assassin’s moves are precise, forceful, and relentless, a bit like a gymnast’s. The Comedian fights like a guy used to winning bar brawls, but strong as he is, he’s no match. For the assassin, it seems personal somehow. Why else does he take his time so? Draw out his victim’s pain? It’s a brilliant scene and pulled me right in.

The opening credit sequence is probably the most creative thing Snyder’s done in any of his three studio movies. Period. Showing us glimpses of historic moments in superheroing past, the hyper-detailed credit sequence is not just poignant and visually arresting, it’s a marvel of efficiency. The credit sequence sets up the complicated alternate reality of real-life superheroes in two and a half minutes. A director with less talent might have taken considerably more time to lay the same foundation. And Snyder’s use of Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” works perfectly here, underscoring the feeling of sadness and loss that permeates the story.

Because Snyder’s song choices are usually so pitch perfect and unexpected, (and the use of the Dylan song here is no exception) I was surprised in a few instances at some obvious, ham-fisted music queues that pop up here and there during the rest of the film. Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” for the Comedian’s funeral? It was so on the nose emotionally, its effect was almost comic. Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” for Dr. Manhattan’s appearance in Vietnam seemed similarly lazy. Surely, there must have been a subtler way to evoke “Apocalypse Now” then to use that same damn song Coppolla used. One critic who saw the film asked for a moratorium on the use of “Hallelujah” in films indefinitely, and I second that. It was cool when I first heard it in “Shrek," but listening to Leonard Cohen's weird cover of it while Nite Owl and Silk Spectre have superhero sex made me wince.

For a good while, the film settles into the deliberate-pace set by the comic. We meet the members of the now-defunct “Watchmen” years after they’ve disbanded (by government order), and we lay out the essence of the plot: someone may or may not be killing off the old Watchmen one by one.

First, fantastic casting all around, but the best bit of casting has to be Jackie Earle Haley’s turn as the psychotic crime-fighting detective Rorschach. His despairing, defiant final moment in the Antarctic snow is one of my favorite bits of film acting I’ve seen in a long while. Patrick Wilson does great work as Nite Owl, nailing the broken schlub with some fight still left in him, and Malin Ackerman’s work as Silk Spectre was a pleasant surprise – I hadn’t expected anyone to pull off what I thought was a fairly thin character, but she does excellent work here.

The only actor I had an issue with was Carla Gugino, whose work I usually like. When she’s playing the young version of her character, Sally Jupiter, AKA the original Silk Spectre, she’s great. But when she has to play the elderly Jupiter, she comes off like a poor man’s Lea Thompson in “Back to the Future 2” – the not-quite-right make-up also does her no favors. I found her performance in these scenes distracting and was the movie’s only acting/casting misfire.

In his brief appearance as pre-Dr. Manhattan physicist Jon Ostermann, Billy Crudup does some interesting work and makes me want to see him do more movies, but his performance really takes a backseat to the groundbreaking CG work they did to create Dr. Manhattan. In my mind, he is the most convincingly human CG character created to date. Crudup's physical performance was recorded using motion capture and what you see on-screen is entirely CG. When he is blue, he is an animated character. The first time I saw it, I had no idea. I thought it was crudup in blue makeup. For me, “Watchmen” represents the first time a film has broken the CG actor/real actor barrier. We’re not traveling towards an actor-free movie future at any great rate of speed, but we’re making some incredible leaps in that direction, and Dr. Manhattan is one of the biggest yet. Seeing the film a second time, I was able to see some slightly-off, not-quite-human movements here and there, but only because I was really looking. I'm surprised I haven't seen more written about this achievement.

But getting back to my original question, "How faithful is too faithful?" I've been feeling schizophrenic thinking of an answer, at least as it applies to "Watchmen.". On one hand, I feel grateful to Zach Snyder and the crew for having such respect for the comic that they wanted to bring Moore and Gibbon’s brilliant story to life in film as faithfully as they could. Costumes, set design, make-up, lighting, FX, it was clear in every scene that everyone involved in the production of this film was working their asses off to recreate the graphic novel. The original comic is brilliant, so seeing film artists strive to re-create a work I love was exciting to watch. And, really, what did I have to complain about? In an air-conditioned IMAX theater with ice-cold Diet Coke in hand, I got to watch Dr. Manhattan fly across the surface of Mars in his crystal palace-ship. I got to see Ozymandius beat the hell out of the Comedian and then throw him out of his apartment window. I got to see a heartbroken Rorschach commit suicide-by-demigod.

On the other hand, I couldn’t help but wonder if Snyder’s overriding reverence for the original text was a form of laziness, or worse, a kind of artistic apathy. Comics are a visual, almost filmic medium, and they lend themselves to filmed adaptation pretty well. But, realistically speaking, what were the odds that every component necessary to make “Watchmen” a successful comic book was also present to create a successful film? At times as I watched the film, and saw that they’d brilliantly recreated this or that panel, the entire film began to seem less like an attempt to transfer the power and philosophical depth of the original into a new medium, than it was a show of technicianship; an act of cinematic stenography. By simply filming the comic, only interpreting it into a different medium with a minimum of adjustment, it was as though he were saying, "I don't get really get it, and I don't see what you nerds are all on about with "Watchmen", but here it is just how you want it. Now do me a solid and see it four times so I can make something I'm into."

But then the other voice interrupts this line of thought to remind me that a panel-by-panel recreation of the comic was pretty much what I wanted, and I likes whats I gots. So these two opposing ideas warred in my head and continue to do. I will concede that this film challenges my former way of thinking about adaptations which is, in short, that the harder a filmmaker works to make the film as much like the source material as he can, the better the film will be. But now I’m starting to think that what I used to think was so cut and dried, might not actually be so.

Which brings me to the one moment in the film that Snyder deviated most sharply from the original comic; a moment that also happens to be the most important in the story: the mass murder that ends the threat of nuclear Armageddon and ushers in a new era of peace. Let me briefly lay out the two endings:

In the comic, the plot Rorschach and Nite Owl uncover (famously, just 35 minutes too late), is fellow Watchman Ozymandius's plan to bring world peace by convincing the citizens of Earth they are under attack from giant, Lovecraftian, squid-like aliens. He would do this by teleporting a giant, living, man-made monster with a giant brain cloned from a powerful human psychic directly into New York City. The teleportation would kill the monster, and the resulting psychic wave would kill millions of people in the city.

In the film version, Zack Snyder and his creative collaborators changed the ending so that the plot Rorschach and Nite Owl uncover is Ozymandius' scheme to bring world peace by convincing the citizens of the world that they are under attack by Dr. Manhattan, thus bringing the nations of the world together to fight a common enemy. Ozymandius would achieve this unity by setting off a series of bombs whose blast signature would exactly match that of Dr. Manhattan. The explosions would kill many millions.

I understand why Snyder thought he had to change the ending. To a certain extent, I even agree with the choice. It would have been a major risk to take with a) one's career, and b) a $65 million dollar film already targeted fairly narrowly at comic nerds like myself, which was a risk in and of itself. It's one thing to pull off a cinematic treatment of a naked glowing blue man with white eyes, but quite another to make the above-described squid ending seem anything less than the most expensive acid-trip ever filmed. I'm not sure if I were in Snyder's shoes I'd take that bet either.

And though the film's climax is less batshit crazy than Alan Moore's squid ending, it is, to me, a less effective ending.

The reason, in my view, that the squid ending in Watchmen is so powerful, is because it was so perfectly disorienting. We've only just had Ozymandius, AKA Adrian Veigt, lay out his hyper-expositional plot for his former compatriots before we're faced with the result of that plan's execution. Nite Owl even laughs at the ridiculousness of Veigt's masterplan, telling Adrian he needs psychiatric help.

But then it happens. The ridiculous plan occurs. No matter how weird and goofy his plan may have been, the instant millions died it stops being funny. Six splash-pages of people dead everywhere. Secondary characters we've followed throughout lay in the street, felled by a giant special-effect. Reading the rest of the book went so much faster than what had come before because the squid-caused slaughter is so weird, so impossible, the carnage it wreaks so incredible, that you take in the rest of the story in a daze, working to take in the reality of what happened the same way the people of the world "Watchmen" is set in are struggling to take it in.

It's a brutally effective moment in the story, expertly arrived at and expertly executed, and I think Synder missed out on an opportunity to attempt something similarly bold. I think the mistake was that Snyder opted for a rational and comprehensible ending where something irrational and incomprehensible was called for. What Hunter S. Thompson said about life, I'd apply to the ending: "it never got weird enough." A manmade psychic squid's as good as anything else to get this effect, but if Snyder wanted a safer way out of this cinematic pool of quicksand Moore set up for the poor soul brave enough to attempt to film “Watchmen,” I wished he'd taken a different tack than the ending we got. All told, aside from some of the film's aforementioned missteps, this was a great movie and worthy of the comic it was based on. After having seen it twice in theaters, I'm excited now to see the 3-hour plus cut on Blu-Ray.

ADDENDUM:

Back when "Watchmen" has just come out and a blog post about the movie was actually relevant, Craig Moorhead posted up some questions he had about the movie after seeing it. You can go to that post here (and see some other readers answer those questions) here: Craig's "Watchmen Questions" Now that I'm finally writing my month-and-a-half-late "Watchmen" post, I'll add my answers here:

1. Which was better, the book or the movie or the animated book/movie?
The book.

2. Do you think it would’ve been better if Snyder smoked as much opium as Alan Moore?
Good question. Maybe a bit of opium would have made him decide the squid was worth fighting to keep in the movie.

3. Did Patrick Wilson make the character of Daniel even better than it was in the book?
Yes.
4. If you had cut the movie, how long would it be?
1 hour longer.

5. The ending didn’t really add up, did it?
Sadly, no.

6. Which movie had better characters: Slumdog Millionaire or Watchmen?
Watchmen. But I wasn't that big a fan of "Slumdog", so I'm biased.

7. How great / weird is it to see Kelly “Moocher” Leak making such a strong comeback? Really, there was nothing between ‘Maniac Cop 3′ and ‘Little Children’.
His is a fantastic story. Just proves that if you've got talent, you're never really out of contention to play in the big leagues. I hear he's going to be the new Freddy Krueger, which is great news.

8. How did you feel about the JFK bit in the credit sequence?
Oh yeah. It made me sad and uncomfortable. But a great addition to that credit sequence.

9. Did you find the letters from the filmmakers to be lame or spot on?
Lame only in that they were a bit on the whiny side, but I pretty much agree with everything they're saying.

10. Lee Iacocca seriously took a bullet between the eyes, didn’t he?
He sure as hell did. All two people who in the audience who knew who he was didn't know if that was even worth a titter.

I plan to beat the dead horse that is "Watchmen" a bit more in future posts. So, you know, watch for those.

A Blogger Emerges from His Drawing Cave

2009-04-23T08:30:00.000-04:00

And I'm done!

Well, with this section anyway. More may come. It only took 3 and half months of nights and weekends (and quite a bit of focused procrastination) to create 7 whole pages of a comic book from one Mr S.H.'s script, but I think they turned out all right.

The story so far, in brief, is this: a a boy's house is demolished by a tornado. In the wreckage he finds a glass eye. He and his father go to their church to sit out the storm, which continues to threaten, and the boy discovers that when he holds the glass eye he can see things, frightening things, happening elsewhere. In the page below, the boy has spotted an old woman who may be the owner of that glass eye.

So with this project finished, the blogging should increase.

Next up, "Watchmen" review/thoughts/bloviation.

"Where the Wild Things Are" Trailer is Up

2009-03-26T00:06:00.004-04:00

And page 8 is finished. So close to the end.

Anyway, The trailer is up finally for Spike Jonze' upcoming adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic children's book "Where the Wild Things Are." Here's another instance of a trailer's song perfectly suited to the visuals, Arcade Fire's brilliant "Wake Up" playing over some striking imagery. (The trailer houses right cranking some of these trailers out right now are, I think, creating consistently brilliant film art. I know in reality these guys are just re-using what other artists have created, but the trick of distilling a 2-hour film down into a minute and a half and, on occasion, evoking an emotional response sometimes more powerful than the film itself is able to, is a real feat.)

The way through the creative thicket has been torturous for Jonze and this film. Early test screenings haven't gone very well, audiences complaining the child isn't sympathetic for instance. I'll be interested to see if Jonze has managed to craft a winning film out of what some had written off as an unsalvageable mess.

The trailer shows clearly that they've managed to do a lot with what is, at heart, a short children's picture book long on imagery and short on plot or incident. And as trailer's go, it's very well done. But I'm not racing out the door to buy tickets for this one based on this. It seems like it might be one of those muddled movies that doesn't know if it's for kids or adults and ends up aiming for some muddy middle ground that alienates both audiences. And with rare exceptions, movies that have this difficult a time getting from the first day of shooting to theaters rarely turn out to be successful films. But I'll keep my fingers crossed.

New Comments on Old Posts

2009-03-24T23:05:00.003-04:00

Good news: I'm nearly done with my drawing project. I'll be finishing page 8 of 9 tonight and tomorrow. With luck I'll be finished with page 9 by the end of the weekend and into the corrections and and touch-ups and polishing early next week.

Bad news: I'll probably be blogging a lot more very soon.

I wanted to post up a quick blog for two reasons.

1.) Heath posted "Dead blog" in the comments. His occasionally writing this doesn't prompt me to write a new entry every time I see it, but it does work some of the time. So here you go.

2.) I got two comments on random old posts within one 24-hour period. I'm going to throw them up here right now because it's a super easy blog post, and because these comments are very nearly interesting.

a.) First, the shorter one, posted up at 6:27 this morning on my "Chronicles of Riddick" review from way back in the day:

"The Chronicles of Riddick is a story that made a lasting impression on me.
Went to video rental shop and saw the title and decided to give it a try...and good lord was i surprised??
After seeing the movie went back to the shop to rent the Pitch Black. The both movies were shockingly good that I had to buy both DVD's in DVD store. I put it in a same category of epic proportions movies such as The Lord of the Rings. Can't wait to see the third sequence of Riddick in theater and then buy the DVD again to finish my collection.
Vin Diesel is just too damn good actor. Tony"

b.) And here's the other, posted up at 4:25 this morning on my "Dark Knight" blog where I try and get at who might be the villain for the third Batman movie:

Ok, I have thought about this long and hard and the villain I think the main villain in the next Nolan Batman movie should be…(drum roll please)…the Penguin. Yeah, I know a lot of people out there are against the Penguin, and I know Chris Nolan has stated that he believes the Penguin would be one of the harder villains to pull off, but I humbly disagree. Bare with me as I list the reasons why I think he would work and why I think he is one of the best, most unappreciated Batman foes, as well as counter some familiar criticism about him:

1) He is realistic: The thing about the Penguin, like almost all of Batman's Golden Age foes, is that technically he his not a super-villain - he is an arch criminal. And there is a big differenced between the two. A super-villain is just the evil version of a super-hero, someone who possesses powers and abilities beyond us, while an arch-criminal is a specific type of criminal in the real world but shown in a larger than life manner. Catwoman is the femme fatale/cat-burglar writ large; Joker is the psychotic anarchist criminal; Two-Face is the idea of victim turned criminal; hell, Batman isn’t even a superhero in the original comics or Nolan’s series, he is a classic pulp masked vigilante, more akin to the Shadow, the Spider, The Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro than Superman or Spider-Man. The Penguin fits right in there with that same vibe, since he represents the professional, organized criminal (with an added touch of being flamboyant and stylish). Having said that, it makes it easier for me to believe that a flamboyant gangster with an gun hidden in an umbrella fits Nolan’s universe more than a man with a freeze gun or a woman who can control plants does.

As an arch-version of a gangster, have the Penguin be the new crime boss in Gotham. With all the chaos that the Joker caused, it wouldn’t be that hard to believe that the underworld would be turning to someone to bring order and help them reorganize, and I could even see the normal citizens and politicians of Gotham support him. After the fall of Saddam in Iraq, chaos reigned in Iraq and one of the big fears amongst our politicians and military experts was that the people of Gotham would turn to a strongman and dictator preferring tyranny to anarchy. Same thing happened in Germany after WWI when Hitler rose to power. Well, after Batman smashed the mobs to only have the Joker fill their void; I can easily see the people of Gotham saying they wouldn’t mind a strong organized crime boss keeping the crooks in line – they might still have crime but at least the wouldn’t have anarchy. And from such roots tyrannies are built.

2) He is both dangerous and intelligent: The Penguin in his early history wasn’t nearly as ridiculous or as incompetent as he is now. In his first couple of appearances he killed people, maybe not as often as the Joker but he definitely had a ruthless streak. He also was the first villain to actually escape from Batman and outsmart him. The Joker got busted by Batman in all of his first appearance (or at least appeared to mysteriously die), but not the Penguin; an actual running theme in all of Penguin’s early stories was that he somehow managed to escape. This only stopped after the editorial staff demanded that the Joker stop killing people and the Penguin stopped getting away because they felt it showed that crime did pay.

The other thing about being intelligent means he plots. He has his own goals and ambitions which do not always involve Batman. What realistic plots could Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, Bane or Deadshot have? I mean, Bane and Deadshot would have only one goal/plot – kill Batman. Doesn’t really give the screenwriter’s much to work with. The Penguin, on the other hand, would want to pull of crimes, become the boss of Gotham AND kill Batman (or at least neutralize him). Plenty of more material for the screenwriters to work with.

3) “But isn’t he ridiculous and corny?”: He was not nearly as cheesy as Joker was in the late 40’s through the 60’s. Sure he used trick umbrellas, but Joker was doing just as corny things, like having his own utility belt or trying to have a contest with Clay-Face. And while Joker was allowed to be updated and modernized, for some reason the Penguin has been forced to stay in same old character-mold when Burgess Meredith did him. That would be like letting the Caesar Romero interpretation of the Joker be the definitive one.

However, if I can offer a suggestion to help make the Penguin relevant again, it would for him to lose the top hat and tuxedo (or at least not wear it all the time). When he originally appeared that was the clothes of choice for a sophisticated gentleman going out on the town, but not anymore. He should be dressed in sartorial splendor by today’s standards, wearing Armani and Brioni suits, with Seville Row shirts and an expensive Burberry coats, and replacing his cigarette holder for expensive cigars. I mean if Lex Luthor can get a makeover and not have to wear the lab coat or the grey smock he wore when he first appeared, why does the Penguin have to so fashionably out of date?

And yes he has a funny name and appearance, but who says criminal masterminds have to be scary looking? I mean, look at the history of the mob in the U.S and you’ll see that most crime bosses had funny nicknames and were not that intimidating looking: Tony The Ant, Joey the Clown, Murray “the Camel” Humphreys, Vinnie the Chin, etc. Crossed them, however, and you’d be wearing concrete shoes at the bottom of Gotham Bay. Make the Penguin a short, sartorially aware crime boss who earned his nickname because of his walk (imagine Vito from the Sopranos) and uses an umbrella as a cane just like how some people use a putter as a cane.

And the thing about the Penguin is that he supposed to be underestimated. It is the reason the umbrella was chosen as his weapon – it serves as a metaphor for the Penguin’s character and nature. Like his umbrellas, the Penguin appears as something completely harmless and even mundane, but also like his umbrellas it actually conceals something very deadly that people completely underestimate. The umbrella doesn’t have to be outfitted with a hundred different weapons, just the ones he had when he first appeared – a concealed blade and gun (plus it is weighted to be used as a bludgeon).

Besides, who says ridiculous looking people can’t be powerful or scary? I mean, the world was terrorized by a short little Corsican in the early 19th century, and in the 20th century an Austrian painter with a Charlie Chaplin moustache and a tendency to yell comically during rallies became the greatest villain in history.

4) Go back to the basics: Just like how Nolan only used those elements from the Joker that would fit his version of Batman, so could Nolan cherry pick through the Penguin and only use those elements that mesh with his vision. I mean, Nolan pretty much discarded anything about the Joker post 1940’s, getting rid of the entire Red Hood origin and focusing only on his first couple of appearances. Well, the same could be done with the Penguin: hell, his real name of Oswald Cobblepot wasn’t revealed until 1981 in DC Comics Blue Ribbon Digest, along with his origin of being a rich kid raised by an over protective mother. For 40 some years he wasn’t hampered by that ridiculous back-story and tacky name, but instead was just a sophisticated criminal who had an interesting nickname and gimmick (umbrellas and birds). That leaves you plenty of room to reinterpret him.

Like the Joker, they should avoid an origin story and have the Penguin entire as a complete character. And also like the Joker, it should be a story about the rise of the Penguin (similar to his very first appearances in the 40s). The Penguin appears, is underestimated by even the other criminals, and before anyone knows it he is the head of crime in Gotham City.

5) “But the Penguin isn’t a physical threat for Batman”: Many people will say that the Penguin would not be as intimidating or as dangerous as the Joker, and wouldn’t scare the audience as much as the Joker did, or have them view him as a big enough threat. I have to say yes and no to that idea. Yes, on a personal one-on-one basis the Penguin is not going to give Batman as good as fight as the Joker, but than again the Joker wasn’t that much of a physical threat to Batman either. The Joker in the Dark Knight mostly challenged Batman’s belief system, not his physical safety. Also, who says that a great villain has to be a physical threat? I mean, Goldfinger and Blofield are probably Bond’s greatest challenges, and they are no matches for him physically. Same with Moriarity, Sherlock Holmes arch enemy, and Superman’s foe Lex Luthor.

Plus, why should the Penguin be required to fight Batman one-on-one? If the Penguin truly is a criminal mastermind he would avoid confronting the Dark Knight any way he could. Why fight a master of martial arts? Instead, a smart crime boss would instead have henchmen and minions fight Batman, and some of those guys could be pretty tough. Think of Bond movies where the main villain always had one or two really tough henchmen who served him.

Or look at gangster movies like the Godfather or the Untouchables, where the big boss isn’t always the toughest guy out there. Vito and Michael Corleone are not fighters like Sonny, but ruthless crime bosses who command killers like Luca Brassi and Al Neri. Sure they are capable of killing people, but usually by being cunning and taking people by surprise. They are not soldier’s however (excluding Michael’s stint in the marines, of course) but manipulators. The same with Al Capone in the Untouchables: he might bash someone’s head in at a meeting, but that doesn’t display his toughness as much as his willingness to kill and be ruthless. He isn’t dumb enough to take on Elliot Ness himself, but instead sends his own killers such as Frank Nitti against him and his Untouchables.

Instead of having the Penguin physically confront Batman, have some of his henchmen confront the Caped Crusader. Amongst his servants could be a who’s who of tough-guy character actors: Chuck Zito, Danny Trejo, Kimbo Slice, Tyler Mane, Brock Lesnar, etc. Plus, who is to say the Penguin has to be the only villain in the movie? I mean, I could easily see him harboring hatred for both Batman and a female cat burglar who won’t bow to his rule, or him having a couple of tough enforcers that work for him (maybe one who is a “deadshot with pistols and the other has a rare skin disorder that makes him look like an alligator or crocodile).

6) The Penguin could represent a new type of villain and be more relevant: The Joker (and Scarecrow and Ra’s al Ghul) are basically metaphors for terrorism and the anarchistic, nihilistic forces out there. And since 9-11 that has been the public’s biggest worry. But since the collapse of the economy I believe people will have find someone new that they hate more, and that is CEOs, the heads of Wall Streets and politicians. Basically, all of the powerful people who they feel control their lives and they are powerless to stop because they are too rich and connected. And the Penguin can represents those forces much better than any other Batman foe could. Just like in the 50’s and 60s in such movies as Underworld USA and Point Blank, where the underworld used as a metaphor for the corporate world, so could the Penguin be used to represents the heads of businesses and the hedge fund managers who manipulate the government for their own profit.

And like the Joker who had a philosophy why he did all of this (he was a nihilist who wanted to throw Gotham in anarchy), the Penguin would be a man who believes everyone has a price – even Batman. Sure, sometimes the price isn’t money, but if you find the right leverage anyone can be bought. Think Don Corleone, “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.” The Penguin is the ultimate businessman.

7) And finally, look at the fake 1940’s Orson Welles’ Batman trailer on youtube. How can you say he doesn’t work as a Batman foe after looking at Edward G. Robinson’s “version” of the Penguin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu5tJGfZsgc

Sorry to ramble on, but I am a big fan of the Penguin and think he has been getting a short end of the stick by Nolan and others out there.

Posted by Thomas to Crane's Inanities at 4:25 AM"

Obviously, I didn't read all of that, but just from what I skimmed through, the dude makes some good points. Even though the idea of Penguin as the main villain in a Christopher Nolan Batman movie seems laughable on its face, it doesn't seem so implausible if you look at it.

Anyway, the hiatus ends soon.

A Producer of "Watchmen" Tells His Side of the Fox/Warner Bros. Story; And the Reasons for an Impending Lull

2009-01-08T19:23:00.008-05:00

The other day, I posted Daniel O'Brien's nutritional advice to Fox studio executives, as well as my own reaction to the legal decision handed down on Christmas Eve regarding the inter-studio fight over the rights to "Watchmen."

Today, Lloyd Levin, one of the producers of "Watchmen", weighed in with an open letter. You can read it here. There's not a lot of vitriol in this letter (and certainly none of the hilarious variety as in Daniel O'Brien's), but there's a lot of new information, and some real, heartfelt disappointment. It's a persuasive letter. I'd be interested to hear some pro-Fox positions from knowledgeable fans or studio people in the know, but my hunch is we won't ever read anything like that because Fox only had one reason to sue: money. And no one gets passionate about defending greed.

Also, the frequency of my posts in the next few months may be even more anemic than they have been, as I'm devoting my free time to an art project. Here's a sample:

A friend of friend and blog reader Shawn H. is compiling a book project that would collect an assortment of short stories illustrated in comic form. I'm illustrating Shawn's short story, entitled "Finders Keepers," a "weird tale" about a young man's discovery of a glass eye imbued with strange powers. We hope it will eventually be part of the collection. I've got my fingers crossed.

Right now I've got two pages finished, and for the next few months, I'll be working on the other 7 that will comprise the first half of the story. Because my drawing style for this is so detail-intensive, I think this will grab up a lot of time I might otherwise spend posting up my inane blog entries. But on the plus side, it's a lot of fun to draw, Shawn's fantastic story is eerie and perfectly suited to comic book treatment, and when we're finished, we'll both have some interesting work in a different medium we can point to with pride.

Provided I don't f**k up that is.

So bear with me during this new lull in fresh inanities.

"Valkyrie"

2008-12-30T22:43:00.005-05:00

I saw "Valkyrie" last night at my local AMC multiplex in a relatively crowded theater (very crowded for a Tuesday night). My sister and I saw it. My wife wouldn't go because she hates Tom Cruise with a purple passion; once she found out his character isn't pulled apart "like warm bread" (as one character threatens) at the end of the film, and in excruciating "Braveheart"-style real-time treatment, all interest, however meager, vanished entirely for her.

(Note: Some mild spoilers below.)

This was a good movie with great pedigree (Bryan Singer directing, Christopher McQuarrie writing) but some not-so-great backstory. It never augers well when a a film's been pushed back from a summer release to a Christmas release, as this film was, but this time it appears the reason for the delay was not quality-related.

"Valkyrie" follows a group of German army officers, led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise), as they plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. As with "Titanic", the conclusion of the film is foregone -- they fail. Hitler kills himself in his bunker 9 months after the Valkyrie plot fails. But unlike "Titanic," which used the sinking of the cruise liner as a backdrop for a love story, "Valkyrie"'s destined-to-fail assassination plot is the focus. So while I got wrapped up in the 'how' of the plotters' plotting, the suspense Singer and McQuarrie are able to wring out of the subject matter (and it does manage to be extraordinarily suspenseful at times) is in spite of, not because of the subject matter.

So, in its way, "Valkyrie" is a big-budget studio spectacular about failure. In this case, epic failure. Considering what Stauffenberg's failure meant for the world, 9 more months of calamitous war at the very least, this film may depict the greatest failure in human history.

That it is a movie about failure, and more specifically, about a failure, makes it flawed in cinematic terms right off the bat. The build of a successful screenplay demands the hero meet the goal the screenwriter has set for him, even if that goal isn't exactly what the hero intends. The hero's victory has to be hard-fought, certainly, but he has to do it. If our hero's difficult goal is not met, if the assassination plot does not end in an assassination, the emotional release the audience expects the story to deliver is not delivered. When the hero ultimately fails, in some ways, the story fails as well.

But in this instance, the movie's primary defect is also a big part of why I liked it. Yes, Stauffenberg fails. But his defeat is rendered in such exacting, excruciating detail, it's kind of a sick thrill to watch. When it all starts to go bad, when the formerly pro-coup bureaucrats in the War Ministry begin to slink off, knowing everything will certainly come to a bad end, it is a rare pleasure to watch fine actors like Bill Nighy, Terrence Stamp, and even Tom Cruise, as the full impact of their failure registers on their faces. I also liked that the film never shied away from the hard details of the plot. Getting Adolf Hitler to sign a document, an important detail that might get less attention in a different film, is raised to the level of white knuckle suspense in "Valkyrie," and Singer makes it work.

There's plenty of quality filmmaking here to enjoy, moments and performances of real quality, but the tinge of failure emenating from the doomed plot casts a pall over the entire movie it's never quite able to overcome.

Daniel O'Brien Has a Message for the Executives at 20th Century Fox

2008-12-30T13:07:00.000-05:00

This is kind of an odd way to come back and put up an actual post after the long drought, but, as it has to do with one of my pop culture obsessions, and is also pretty damn funny, I thought it needed to be shared.

As some of you may already know, 20th Century Fox is suing Warner Bros. over "Watchmen." Fox says they own the rights, Warner says eff off, and that's where we stand. Or stood. On Christmas Eve, a judge decided in favor of 20th Century Fox.

A follower of the suit and a fellow "Watchmen" fan named Daniel O'Brien wrote a letter to the executives at Fox in response to the decision that eloquently condensed my own on the matter. That letter is here and it made me laugh.

(WARNING: to all readers of the Inanities who find themselves getting offended on a regular basis, this letter might not be for you.)

The Aintitcool link to the letter where I originally found link this can be found here.

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-25T23:02:00.002-05:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, Your Next President

2008-11-05T00:31:00.000-05:00

Election Eve

2008-11-03T20:46:00.003-05:00

The election is tomorrow.

This long campaign is finally at an end.

I'm helpless not to think Obama doesn't already have it sewn up. McCain's position has moved not a whit in the polls, and Obama hasn't made a mistake in months. I believe Barack Obama will be our nation's 44th President, and I believe we'll know it before working stiffs on the East Coast trudge to bed tomorrow night. I believe he will win big, and he will enter his first term with a mandate.

So I'll get a jump on the pundits who will plow this fertile ground into dust on Wednesday, and say what I think an Obama presidency might look like.

I think some of us liberals will be disappointed in some of his decisions. He's never teetered too far over to the left in the general election, and he was cautious about doing so in the primaries. He's a pragmatist above all else. When gas prices were at historic highs and the public was clamoring for off-shore oil drilling, Obama put aside his long-held opposition to it and supported a bill that contained a provision lifting the federal ban on some off-shore oil drilling in exchange for some forward-looking legislation that went some way towards easing our dependence on foreign oil. Republicans killed it, of course, but Obama's realpolitik shifting is, for me, a clear sign that there are few liberal sacred cows that will truly be sacred in an Obama White House. To me, this just means there's no issue under the sun that Obama doesn't consider worthy of reconsideration, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

Will he get us out of Iraq? I believe he will begin to draw down combat forces very soon, but I don't think Obama will have all US military personnel out of Iraq before the end of his first term, and probably not after the end of two. I think we're consigned to have a long-term, empire-expanding military base in Iraq, and that would have been so had Hillary won the nomination. But we will draw down. Under McCain, we would not. Clear delineation. I think Obama will have "won" the Iraq occupation if he can manage our drawdown without an explosion of internecine fighting, and get us to a point where Iraq is just another place where we happen to have soldiers stationed. Like Kosovo is now. I question the wisdom of having a far-reaching network of military bases all over the world, but that doesn't seem to be a conversation the people want to have right now, and Obama isn't the kind to force a discussion on any but the most pressing issues. Another reason I like him. But the only reason I think he has true credibility on Iraq, no matter what he decides to do there, is that he was against going in in the first place. We know he has no secret desire to re-shape the Middle East because he's one of the sane people who, back in 2002-03, thought it was an unbelievably stupid idea to go into Iraq, but, like the rest of us, finds himself trying to make the best of a bad situation.

I think Obama will have a steady hand in steering our way through the developing financial crisis. My main worry is that this crisis, which is likely immune to most Executive tinkering, will endure, and the stink of deep recession will attach itself to this new president, and consign him unfairly to a single term. My hope is that he can FDR his way out of this by attempting smart and inventive solutions that will impress voters. Even if none of the solutions are particularly successful, people will be grateful he tried as best he could.

One thing I believe may define this presidency more than any other single component, is its caution. When Clinton got in, he was like a gifted poly sci professor suddenly given the keys to the kingdom. He was idealistic and, to my mind, never more admirable than in those first few months in the White House. But on the flipside, he and his administration were messy, sacrificing political expediency for lofty ideals. If the 2-year Obama campaign has been any guide, there will be no messiness in an Obama administration. I imagine Axelrod and Plouffe and the other Obama gurus are keen to guide their candidate, soon President, through a first 100 days as flawless as the last 100 days of the campaign. But I think they might do well to remember, the last candidate to run a near-perfect campaign was George W. Bush. But then again, I think they know that too, and are eager to steer their guy around the shoals the Bush administration crashed into and broke apart on.

I'm excited about tomorrow. I think the results will show that the country has repudiated Rove-style politics, Bush-style foreign policy, and is ready to embrace the possibility that we deserve a politics that isn't defined by fear. But, more historically, it will show the world we've come a long way since the end of the Jim Crow South. I'm not so naive I think an Obama presidency will in any way end racism, or even seriously diminish it in this country, but I think it will change the discussion in a positive way and give people a new way of thinking about race. That's a big step.

The last eight years, a true dark night of the soul for this country, will finally, irrevocably be finished tomorrow. We're going to get something very new, and to some extent, I owe the White House's current occupant a debt of gratitude. Only by doing the job he was selected to do so badly, could an Obama presidency even be possible. Had he just been ordinarily bad at his job, we might have gotten more of the same, slightly improved, just with a different letter in front of his name. But because the current president was so extraordinarily bad at his job, Americans were willing to be a bit more imaginative when thinking about who might be the best successor. If we had spectacularly bad, we thought, maybe we should try for spectacularly good?

That may be overstating things a bit, but tonight, it doesn't feel like overstatement. Right now the future years of President Barack Obama are limitless potentiality. Though he might turn out to be a Carter, he might also turn out to be an FDR, or a Kennedy. I'm fine to let the hyperbole stand for now and enjoy the moment; it comes around seldom enough, I think I'm entitled.

I'm excited and hopeful, and looking forward to watching the returns tomorrow night. I think we're going to have a good night.

More Live Blogging

2008-10-07T21:58:00.019-04:00

Just to break this thing into a couple posts.

9:59 -- McCain is not winning any hearts and minds with that his obsession with Obama's fines.

10:02 -- Obama's said exactly this stuff about McCain's judgement to go into Iraq in the previous debate. I'm not saying he isn't right, or that entertaining Brian should be the candidates' job #1, but can we get some new things to say?

10:06 -- Obama hedges a lot. He was going to say we should have gone into Rwanda, but thought it might come back on him, so he hedged a few times. He's already won this thing (meaning the election), now he's working hard not to lose it. I think that's why we're not seeing anything particularly interesting or compelling from Obama in this thing so far. I guess smarts and competence aren't too spectacular.

10:08 -- Ugh!! More questions about the Pakistani border. Does Obama support going in to get Osama even if Pakistan says no? Yes. Does McCain? Yes. What's the difference? McCain wouldn't tell anybody. This is some goofy shit.

10:11 -- Now McCain is going after him about the "announce his intention." Obama's smiling at McCain like the doddering idiot he is because he knows this line of attack isn't changing any minds. The question as to whether Obama's a serious guy when it comes to foreign policy, or Commander-in-Chief worthy has essentially been answered according to polling. Running back over the same tired territory isn't getting him new voters.

10:13 -- This Pakistan is going to go down as the most tired and completely unenlightening meme of the campaign. Ah good. Obama's going after McCain again. It's funny to watch McCain's face when Obama throws the "Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Iran" in his face.

10:16 -- Obama, you said you'd be brief, you'd better be brief.

10:17 -- Okay, good. He was brief.

10:18 -- I totally agree with McCain that Putin's an asshole, but McCain's bombastic approach to US-Russian relations is probably not the way to go. A cool head seems to get us through crises better than a hot one. Obama beats McCain, aGAIN.

10:23 -- Petro-dollars sounds illicit.

10:25 -- Call me a simp, but I like how McCain shook that Navy Chief's hand and thanked him for his service.

10:26 -- "Without preconditions." The 2nd most tired meme of this campaign. It's like they've gone through the same back and forth on this so many times, they could do it just as well while asleep in their respective beds, each of them dreaming about debating.

10:27 -- What's sort of weird, is that not a one of these audience-member questions have been even slightly original, or intended to get the candidates to speak from a different frame than they've been accustomed to. Each one has allowed both candidates to fall pretty easily into their old stump speeches and debate spiels. NBC didn't do a great job on this one, and another wasted opportunity. We only get three -- I think, to be honest, this poor debate is a direct result of Tim Russert not being alive to moderate it. He would have mixed it up with his goofy gotcha questions. I miss that guy.

10:33 -- "Comrades"?! McCain is an old-style Communist, clearly.

10:34 -- Bob Schieffer's hosting the 3rd debate? It's going to look like a senior center that night. Schieffer's a real sweet guy, but he's so old he needs a younger 2nd host to help him moderate CBS's Sunday Morning show. I guess they were giving him one last moment in the sun before he's too old to ambulate.

10:36 -- Obama won, clearly, but did anyone think McCain made it a close call?

Well, thanks y'all. That was fun. I think McCain gets points for trying to entertain Brian, but in terms of who looks readiest to be Prez, Obama won big time. I'm hoping the 3rd and final one is less of a snoozer, but color me pessimistic.

Live Blogging the Debate

2008-10-07T21:01:00.032-04:00

I'll try "live blogging" tonight's debate between Obama and McCain. What the hell. Why not?

9:02 -- I hate how long it takes for the moderators to realize they're live.

9:03 -- What is McCain writing already? "Obama hand shaking went well."

9:03 -- Obama's up right away. Not even waiting for the question. Nice.

9:06 -- Good first answer. AIG execs need to be fired and give money back. People like executives getting fired. Bear with me folks, this is happening live!!

9:07 -- McCain looks like he's trying to invade the questioner's personal space.

9:08 -- Tom Brokaw's a sport for laughing at that stupid joke. His question is meant to get McCain to say someone who's not Phil Gramm. McCain avoided it. Meg Whitman of eBay? eBay just laid off a truckload of employees today, maybe not Meg Whitman so much.

9:10 -- Obama hit McCain again with his "fundamentals of the economy are strong." I know McCain wishes he has a time machine so he could go back to that morning and slap himself before he uttered those words.

9:11 -- No, McCain!! Don't remind them about your campaign "suspension!" Better they forget it dude, seriously.

9:12 -- Uh oh. McCain's angling to pin the crisis on people who couldn't afford the loans the banks were giving them because the mean ole government was making 'em do it. Not the way to go.

9:14 -- How cool would it be to be one of the people in that town hall? And have Obama and McCain explain their positions to you directly. Good times. This town hall's kinda sparsely populated. More like an Apartment Complex Hall.

9:17 -- Sorry folks, I know I'm biased as hell, but Obama's a natural at this. McCain's not bad, but his whole thing with posing on the chair comes off a bit awkward.

9:18 -- It wasn't both parties, lady. It was one, and the Dems turned a blind eye, but this is a Republican-built crisis.

9:19 -- Jesus, look how McCain looks away when Obama looks at him! It's frickin weird. I read something from a guy who studies ape hierarchies and says it's totally basic ape-like behavior -- the submissive ape can't look the dominant ape in the eye. McCain's a guy's guy, so I wonder if it's some basic inferiority complex, if looking at someone who's talking to you is too intense for McCain, or if he just can't bear the site of Obama. Strange stuff.

9:22 -- Planetariums are awesome dude! Three million dollars is a deal!

9:23 -- The common wisdom in Washington seems to be that the people who are serious about energy policy think nuclear energy is a viable option. And it is. But why then is no one talking about the number one problem with nuclear energy is what to do with the waste. I need to know more about what they're going to do with that nasty stuff that, in real terms, never goes away.

9:25 -- Did he just say some of the 700 billion is going to terrorists?

9:26 -- An Apollo program for alternative fuels. Hillary had a similar idea, and it's a good one.

9:27 -- Obama wants to go through it "line by line"? It's called the Line Item Veto, and the president doesn't have it. With the majorities he's going to have in Congress, though, he might just be able to get it.

9:29 -- I'm not sure Obama's "overhead projector" McCain keeps mentioning is igniting the nationwide rage McCain is hoping for.

9:31 -- Obama's getting into Giuliani territory -- dangerous --- no it worked out all right. Turns out to be a shot at Bush. "Go out and shop," Bush said. Obama's right: what a wasted opportunity that was. Hell, politically, that would have been really good for Bush to get people out to make sacrifices with him as the revered leader. The administration was always myopic and completely without imagination.

9:33 -- Obama's looking more and more like the next President of the United States. I'm sorry to have to say that and risk jinxing it, but there's not much of a comparison between these guys. But if it is Obama and he goes in with the Dem majorities they're projecting, he's going to have a really bad situation to steer the country through.

9:36 -- McCain is trying to hang the Herbert Hoover label on Obama? Up is down folks. It's like Cindy McCain saying that Obama's running "the dirtiest campaign in American history." Up is down.

9:38 -- Brokaw's wrong to conflate Medicare and Social Security. Medicare's not in good shape going forward, but Social Security's is solvent for the next 50 years. Maybe the financial crisis has changed that up somewhat, not sure, but Medicare and Social Security are two very different things.

9:40 -- McCain seems to be relaxing a little bit. Good for him.

9:40 -- McCain's laughter is a bit creepy.

9:41 -- We have Congress vote up or down on a massive Social Security plan sounds pretty dangerous. If we'd had more Republicans in Congress in the '04 election, we might have shifted people's social security funds into the stock market. I wonder where all of that money would be now had they gotten the chance to make that change.

9:44 -- Nuclear power -- okay McCain is saying we can reprocess the waste as Japan does. I wonder if this is viable. I hope Obama says something to this.

9:47 -- Obama said we need to give China energy? Is he talking about giving them coal?

9:48 -- Brokaw's coming off kinda schoolmarmish about the lights.

9:49 -- I'd say that if McCain were capable of laying a glove on Obama, I'd say he got the better of Obama on the nuclear question, but I don't think it's what people are really concerned about right now.

9:52 -- His spiel on health care seems very effective to me. (and by "his" I, of course, mean Obama. This must be a laughably one-sided live blog to anyone who's not a Democrat.)

9:53 -- A $5,000 tax credit. It's just like money you save at tax time. Tax credits don't really seem to work the way McCain is thinking, which is as something that augments a family budget.

9:55 -- McCain does not think health care is a right. I don't think that's going to resonate with people-- on the plus side he doesn't seem like he's desperately pandering, but on the other hand, I think he's wrong on this issue.

Bill O'Reilly: Still Effing Crazy After All These Years

2008-10-06T08:30:00.000-04:00

For any of you folks who've seen "Outfoxed", or for those of you poor devils who've actually sat through an entire show, you already know Bill O'Reilly's a guy who believes his emotions tell him more about the world than his intellect. Stephen Colbert, his professional doppelganger/satirizer (who has happily long since outgrown his impression of "Papa Bear"), cuts to the core of O'Reilly when he tells America how his "gut" makes pretty much all of his judgment calls.

I'd kind of forgotten about Bill O'Reilly in recent years. When compared to Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington and Donald Rumsfeld, Bill O'Reilly is really more of a 3rd-tier villain. I think guys like Keith Olbermann and Al Franken have done a good job defanging O'Reilly in recent years, repeatedly exposing his lies (as well as the more unappealing aspects of the personality disorder). I think his impact on the zeitgeist is softer than it once was. Most of his audience, which skews elderly and conservative, are already inclined towards the right-wing point of view. I like to think that, these days, the blustery vacuity of Bill O'Reilly is traveling in a closed circuit, and not having much interaction with the larger national discussion.

But just because we all know O'Reilly's a punchline doesn't mean he does. He still believes he's "fighting the good fight," "talking truth to power" and "keeping 'em honest" and all sorts of megalomaniacal delusions like that. In his defense, I assume it's difficult to see yourself how everyone else sees you when everyone from President Bush to Barack Obama is willing to appear on your comedy show unironically and keep a straight face.

But, as I recently saw from a YouTube clip, O'Reilly's still dishing out the crazy self-righteousness that made him enemy #1 to people who've entertained thoughts.

This video from an "O'Reilly Factor" show last week, shocked me. Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank went on the "Factor" last week to talk about the financial meltdown. To some extent, it's Frank's own fault for encouraging O'Reilly and going on his show. But I have never seen television like this. I have never seen a pundit scream at and so casually disrespect a government representative like this. Not ever. Click here to see the bizarrity.

Clearly I believe our media needs to hold our elected officials more accountable for the things they do in our name. But when I think of "hold them accountable," I'm thinking more along the lines of asking politicians and policy makers tough questions and then actually making them answer those tough questions. Not this kind of childish, chest-thumping tantrum that lowers the level of discourse and makes everyone look diminished for participating. Hasn't Bill O'Reilly just become Morton Downey Jr, at this point? Albeit with better-quality guests? What a complete embarrasment.

To me, this is more like what "holding them accountable" looks like.

Brits with Ukuleles do the "Shaft" Theme; Moriarty Sees some "Watchmen" And Likes What he Sees

2008-10-04T15:51:00.004-04:00

This made me grin foolishly for a few minutes. The lyrics don't start till a little ways through, so stay tuned for those.

Oh there's more space to fill. Hmm.

Click here to read what Aintitcool stalwart Moriarty thought of the three scenes from "Watchmen" Zach Snyder and Warner Bros. showed to selected press last week. If you haven't read the graphic novel or have read it but want to go into the movie relatively fresh, avoid the paragraphs of dense description. Everything else is pretty interesting. But his take on how confident and excited the Warner Bros execs are about this film is more than encouraging.

The buzz is building and it is all very good.

"Benjamin Button" Trailer

2008-09-29T20:40:00.004-04:00

Instead of talking about important things, like the complete reorganization of our entire financial system, or the still viable possibility of having a dangerous rube one heartbeat away from the presidency, I thought I'd post a link to the latest trailer for likely Oscar contender, David Fincher's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

Take a look, here.

Looks promising. I'd go on about it, but I've got a cold and I'm sleepy. I'll make two points though: 1.) Brad Pitt looks to be doing some amazing work here; I predict a Best Actor nomination for this based on what I'm seeing. And 2.) As beautifully shot and interesting as this looks, it seems to have the potential to be a long, ponderous "Meet Joe Black" kind of disappointment, but that's just uninformed supposition based on a minute and a half of footage. What it has going for it though is Fincher. Guy hasn't made a bad movie yet.

Another award-winning blog post.

Economy in Meltdown

2008-09-22T07:04:00.000-04:00

This morning on TV, this guy looked really nervous.

Since he's the Secretary of the Treasury, that's not a good thing.

I know a lot about like two things. And since I don't know what either of those things are, imagine my distress at trying to figure out what the hell's going on with the economic meltdown my country currently finds itself in.

Big brokerage houses are getting bailed out (Bear Stearns), others are dying outright (Lehmann Brothers), quasi-private/quasi-public mortgage-lending institutions (Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac) and insurance giants (AIG) are being taken over by the federal government. If that weren't frightening enough, most of this happened in one week.

On Thursday/Friday, a massive, federally-backed bailout package was introduced by Treasury Secretary Paulson that, if enacted, will make the US taxpayer responsible for all of that bad mortgage debt that's in the process of sinking the world economy. It will also, as we're learning, require $700 billion to implement. That's $700 billion in addition to the billions we already sunk into taking over AIG and the two Macs. And now they're talking about buying the bad mortgage debt from foreign banks. I guess the Treasury's going to hold off on printing any more singles for a while. Got to crank them hundreds out.

Leaving aside for a moment where all of this money is coming from, particularly as we're laying out $10 billion a month for the Iraq occupation, will this new plan (which sent the markets way up on Friday) actually work? Among others, prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is dubious:

The Treasury plan ... looks like an attempt to restore confidence in the financial system — that is, convince creditors of troubled institutions that everything’s OK — simply by buying assets off these institutions. This will only work if the prices Treasury pays are much higher than current market prices; that, in turn, can only be true either if this is mainly a liquidity problem — which seems doubtful — or if Treasury is going to be paying a huge premium, in effect throwing taxpayers’ money at the financial world.
And there’s no quid pro quo here — nothing that gives taxpayers a stake in the upside, nothing that ensures that the money is used to stabilize the system rather than reward the undeserving.

I hope I’m wrong about this. But let me say it again: Treasury needs to explain why this is supposed to work — not try to panic Congress into giving it a blank check. Otherwise, no deal.

So not everyone's sold on the new plan. But if it doesn't work, then what? Before the plan was announced, one government official in a position to know told a reporter the US financial system was days away from collapse. What if the rest of the plan's details, when announced, make the markets anxious again? In other words, what if they don't buy it? In this climate, anxious markets mean more massive bank failures. Would the world markets respond as positively to a 2nd massive bailout plan after the first failed? Doesn't it seem like this plan, hastily conceived as it is, is our only shot to stave off a decade(s)-long economic disaster?

There are some early and troubling signs this may be the case.

Senator Chris Dodd and Minority Leader John Boehner appeared together this morning on George Stephanoplous's "This Week", (along with the nervous-seeming Paulson) and appeared in total agreement on Paulson's $700 billion bailout plan. Stephanopolous pressed them on their uncharacteristic unanimity, asking what they'd each been told that could possible inspire two people so inclined to disagree to agree so completely. They wouldn't say, but they both strongly implied their motivation to make common cause was terror of the alternative.

So worst-case scenario is this plan doesn't work. It's probably too early to get too deeply invested in that scenario. If you want a reminder of what that looks like, read "Grapes of Wrath" or watch "Cinderella Man."

But what does it mean if this plan does work? Will it be a fair plan? A Wall Street type wrote this to the blog "Talking Points Memo" :

"As a Wall Street guy I am sort of glad that this bailout is being organized. However, what seems unfair to me is that there are absolutely no provisions for homeowners. Moreover, this morning on Stephanopulous I saw Hank Paulson talking about homeowners taking out mortgages that were higher than they could afford and about them needing to live up to their obligations.
I find it incredible that he would use language like that while asking taxpayers to send a trillion dollars to Wall Street because investment banks made irresponsible investments and aren't able to live up to their obligations."

No provisions for homeowners? That seems a bit myopic, doesn't it? After all, isn't the purchasing power of the American consumer (ie "homeowners") the fuel that runs the US economy? If our financial institutions come out okay, but homeowners are left high and dry, how's the engine going to run without that US consumer fuel? The ups and downs of the stock market usually don't break through the white noise of the typical news cycle for me, but the sense of panic in the air these days is hard to miss.

It seems like you need at least a B.A. in Economics to truly understand the forces at play here, so for uneducated laymen like myself, I'm forced to rely exclusively on the commentary and opinion of those who do understand what's happening to draw my own conclusions. The fact that all of those people seem kind of terrified, does not lessen my growing feeling of dread.

What's Going On?

2008-09-11T08:30:00.000-04:00

My friend in Taiwan IMed me this morning and asked, "What the hell is going on in the United States right now?"

The truth is, I have no idea. I'm pretty mystified at what's been happening in the '08 general election, particularly since John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.

What seemed at first like an obviously campaign-ending decision by John McCain has in recent days become almost universally touted as a political masterstroke. My first hint that the US had slipped into Bizarro World was when I tuned into "This Week with George Stephanopolous" the Sunday morning following her selection. Of the 4 gathered panelists in George's round table, only the ineffectual Sam Donaldson seemed to think choosing a politician with next to no foreign policy experience after hitting Obama for the exact same resume gap was too reckless and nakedly hypocritical for his campaign to recover from. Everyone else? Loved her. Thought it was a great move politically. I thought they'd all had strokes. Turns out, joke's on me.

Naked hypocrisy, apparently, means nothing when you're dealing with the people who have, to date, been sitting this election out because John McCain isn't conservative enough to arouse their interest. They're waiting to hear their politicians say a few things. Like "opposed to abortion even in the case of rape, incest and life of the mother." Like "believes in the literal truth of the Bible." Like "believes Creationism should be taught in public schools." They've heard it from the McCain camp, and now they can get excited. From all appearances, Sarah Palin is as hostile to education, intellect and science as a lot of Evangelical voters are, and so McCain has quite cynically bought himself a lot of votes by choosing her to be his Vice President.

I feel like I'm staring down the barrel of another goddamn 4 years of Republican dominance of two branches of the federal government. A loss this year would be a shock to the system I can hardly contemplate.

Before I go too far down that path of fear and loathing, I will briefly relate some of what maddening-but-independent-seeming Camille Paglia wrote on Salon.com today. She said that a.) she doesn't believe as the gospel truth everything they're writing about Sarah Palin's alleged far-right religious views, which seems like a sensible viewpoint. Paglia likens all the stuff they're writing about her crazy Christian views to the stuff they were saying about Obama's Muslim-ness and unpatriotic-ness, and Lawd knows that stuff was bullshit. So whenever McCain thinks Palin's got a good evasive line down for each of the scandals percolating back in her home state (and learns the names of all the important world leaders), and lets her have a serious sit-down interview, maybe she'll let us know where she stands on all those wedge issues (abstinence, abortion, evolution, guns) that have gotten Evangelicals excited, and have us progressives terrified/angry. If she's as bad as I'm hearing she is (and suspect she is), on these issues, then a McCain win in November might be the only thing worse than a 3rd Bush term.

Bill Clinton Needs to Get Over It

2008-08-26T21:02:00.003-04:00

Bill Clinton said this today in Denver:

"Suppose for example you're a voter. And you've got candidate X and candidate Y. Candidate X agrees with you on everything, but you don't think that person can deliver on anything. Candidate Y disagrees with you on half the issues, but you believe that on the other half, the candidate will be able to deliver. For whom would you vote?"

He went on to say he wasn't talking about the current election but that's probably a lie.

I don't know that Hillary would agree with this idea--she didn't say it after all--but let's take Bill's hypothetical on face value for a minute.

First, the most egregious aspect of what Bill said: According to her husband, Hillary agrees with the majority of Democrats on just half of traditional Democratic issues. Could that be true, or does Bill believe Hillary's even more centrist (read: more right-of-center) than she led us to believe during the primary season? If Bill's right about what his wife thinks, then that essentially confirms what a lot of Obama voters suspected about Hillary. It's nice for me to be validated like that, so thanks Bill. (I personally suspect Hillary's not quite so Republican as her husband does, but we'll move on.)

But I also just want to question the logic behind Bill's "rhetorical" question. In his question, he makes the assumption that the hypothetical voter "knows" that Candidate Y, (Hillary), will be "able to deliver" on the half of the issues she agrees with her party on, and Candidate X (Obama), won't be able to "deliver on anything." The fact is, no voter knows how any candidate will do once in office. All we can do as voters is draw conclusions based on evidence. That's what campaigns are about. We don't know, as Bill does, how well Hillary would be able to deliver on the half of Democratic core issues Hillary actually believes in. Neither do we know how well Obama will do. But when you compare two essentially unknown quantities (and don't possess the ability to see into the future as Bill does), do you pick the candidate who agrees with you on everything, or the one who agrees with the other side on half of the issues?

Well, that's a no-brainer.

So even though Bill meant to undercut his party's nominee for president, he may have inadvertently laid out the case why Obama was always the stronger candidate.

Fun Quiz You Will Be Helpless Not to Take

2008-08-20T07:30:00.001-04:00

an you recognize a movie poster based on a single letter from the film's title? How about the movie title this 'C' came from?

Here's a quiz from Empire magazine that puts your movie poster memory to the test.

Not only does it test how well you remember fonts, but it tests how indelibly a given movie has imprinted itself on your brain. And sometimes, it's just a testament to how good the studio marketing departments are, choosing exactly the right font style to go with the film. Anyway, it's virtually impossible to open this quiz and not jump right in. See how many you get.

My score was 28, and then my wife got an additional (and very challenging) two.

On a wild guess, my sister got the very last one (which is punctuation), so I am now deeply impressed by my sister.

Post up your results when you're through.

Brock Sam-- (ahem) Jack Reacher has Some Novels He'd Like You to Read

2008-08-06T08:30:00.001-04:00

As I've complained about before, working has seriously cut into my reading time. Recent high-minded self-improving reading projects, like re-reading "Moby Dick" for instance, are now a thing of the past. All I want to read these days is mindless trash, but it has to be good trash, written by skilled practitioners of the mindless, formula page-turner.

Like Lee Child.

Janet Maslin of The New York Times told me (in a review) that Lee Child's new Jack Reacher novel was fantastic, as were all of Child's 10 previous Jack Reacher novels. Like a good little NYTimes reader, I raced out to the Barnes&Noble and picked up the 10th Jack Reacher novel, "Bad Luck and Trouble," in mass-market paperback, and plowed through it. Good stuff. I had a blast reading about Reacher and his pals running around Los Angeles and Las Vegas, driving up Sunset and Hollywood, killing guys in places I knew. One bad guy meets his end on the Las Vegas strip on that dark, pre-construction no-man's land section of sidewalk that stretches between the low-end Stratosphere side of the strip, and the glitzier Bellagio and MGM Grand side. It's fun knowing exactly where a scene in a book is taking place. And there's just so much killin', and Child makes it so entertaining. After I finished "Bad Luck and Trouble," I read the first novel, then the 2nd, and now I'm into the 3rd. Child writes the pulp, I eat it up. So I think my reading for the foreseeable future is set. Nearly 4 down. Seven to go.

A bit about Jack Reacher. His distinguishing characteristic is that he's "huge" apparently. 6'5" and 22o lbs is "huge" in Lee Child's view. I'm 6'6" and 220 lbs myself, but I'm not sure I really qualify for "huge" the way Lee Child wrote the sentence. In context, "huge" might as well have been "so enormous he could arm-wrestle Hagrid and win." So he's big, and it's kind of fun for me when Child makes some reference to how daily life is slightly different for people who are somewhat taller than the average. Anyway, he's big, but he's also a brilliant detective, and when he finds out who did things he don't like, he likes to deal with the bad guys with his hands, and he's not shy about administering the ultimate sanction. In "Bad Luck and Trouble," for instance, Reacher knocks out two guards and then, while they're lying unconscious, suffocates them to death with his hand over their nose and mouth. Makes good practical sense in the story, the stakes are life and death after all, but there's just something weird about rooting for the hero when he's such a cold-blooded executioner. Maybe I'm just grooving on that frisson between knowing what's intellectually right, and wanting Jack to do what feels right. And in these books, killin' always feels right.

The Jack Reacher novels may be so popular because they pose the eternal question: What would Sherlock Holmes be like if he lived in modern day America, was tall and muscular, looked a bit like Brock Samson from "The Venture Bros.," and liked to commit more murders than he solved?

Well, he would be a bit like Jack Reacher.

I've read a few of the books now so I'm wise to Child's formula but I don't mind it yet. I don't know if I'll get through all 11, but right now they're fun as hell and they're good for those snippets of the day that lend themselves to a quick read -- like the 19 minutes at the fast-food joint of my choice at lunch, for instance, or sitting in line at the 8-minute left turn light on my way home. I was surprised to find how quickly I can knock out a book that way. Anyway, they're definitely worth checking out if you have the time or inclination.

Okay. End of book-related blog post.

Moments from my fast-food eatin' life

2008-08-04T08:30:00.002-04:00

A couple recent moments I witnessed standing inside fast food restaurants:

1.) I was in a McDonald's near Hartsfield waiting for my sweet sweet McGriddle order, when a large black man in a button down shirt and slacks came in. He strolled right up to another line. The manager, a no-nonsense black lady with intense eyes and a voice that could clearly get scary when she needed it to, was giving the usual orders to her crew to keep things running. She sees the guy and a small, appreciative smile appears on her face. He smiles back. They talk for a second and then he asks, "Where you from?" but he asks gently, like he knows the answer and it's a sad one. She smiles proudly, resolutely, and says, "New Orleans." He tells her he thought he recognized the accent. "Why you out here?" he asks. He knows the answer to this one too. "Katrina," she says, like she's saying the name of the bitch that evicted everyone out of her neighborhood. They nod and look at each other, murmuring Mm-hmmms, and then he opens his arms to her and they embrace. He was back out the door shortly after that, and she was still smiling to herself until I left.

2.) A couple of days ago, I was at our Kennesaw Wendy's on my half-hour lunch break. I was standing in line, this time waiting to order a sweet sweet Big Bacon Classic meal, when I heard some people entering the little glassed-in airlock-room all fast food restaurants have. As soon as I looked, I saw two men. One wore sunglasses and was talking on his cell phone. The other was wearing a baseball hat. An instant after I first saw him, the guy in the hat slammed face-first into the first plexi-glass panel. The actual door was two panels downs. I saw his nose mash up against the glass and his hat lift up high on his head. I looked away, smiling. And when I looked back, they were both laughing. He'd seen me see him. When he comes in I assure him I didn't see anything. Later, while I'm waiting for the counter crew to populate my tray with Wendy's goodness, he's in line and tells me about another time he walked full-steam into an immovable object, this time a sliding glass door. Apparently it hurt. His nose and forehead were sore, he said, for days after. I listened and smiled good-naturedly, but all the while I was thinking, "I'm not sure I'd be repeating this stuff to people if I were him. People might think I was stupid." Seemed like a nice guy though.

Who Will be the Villain in the 3rd Batman Film? A Question... And an Answer

2008-08-01T08:30:00.000-04:00

A post on one of my favorite blogs, WWTDD, reminded me of something I wanted to bring up at the end of my "Dark Knight" post.

British newspaper and shining purveyor of unvarnished truth, the Telegraph UK, recently published a rumor that Christopher Nolan's next film in the Batman saga is called "Gotham," Catwoman plays a large part in the film, and Angelina Jolie is apparently hot to do the part.

This all seems like complete BS to me for a lot of obvious reasons, but it did make me wonder who Nolan's going to use as the villain in the third film. If not Catwoman (and he still could, of course), than who? How would Batman's other comic book nemesi appear in the Christopher Nolan's Batverse? I run down the list in my head, and most of them seem too outlandish to fit into Nolan's Gotham, but he's got to pick somebody, right?

Catwoman's not a bad bet, but she's been done to death, and I'm sure the stink of the Halle Berry disaster is still cloud-thick in the halls of Warner Bros. So probably not her. Riddler? Too much like the Joker. Killer Croc? Probably too sci-fi. Experiments gone wrong is more Marvel's thing anyway. Ra's Al Ghul's been done, though, since he is immortal, he could make a fun return in the 3rd film. But it would have to be a classic Batman villain, right? Someone people have heard of.

At this point, my money's on the Penguin. I feel like an idiot for writing that, but there it is. Where's the one part of Bruce Wayne's life where he hasn't yet been attacked? As Bruce Wayne. (Sure there was the thing in his apartment, but that wasn't about him, that was about Dent.) He's a savvy corporate operator, and a talented executive. And his control of Wayne Enterprises helps keep Batman in business. So what if someone more able and more cunning than Bruce came in and took that all away? A corporate takeover like that would imperil not only Bruce Wayne but Batman as well. Who could even do that, powerful as Bruce is? Only another powerful and savvy tycoon. Like ... the Penguin.

I think he could very easily be adapted into the Gotham of these new Batman films. He wouldn't wear a top hat or have a monocle. And he wouldn't have that weird squawk thing some other actors have done with the Penguin. I imagine him as a kind of Dick Cheney/Kingpin/Lex Luthor amalgam, attacking Batman from all angles, providing Bruce Wayne with his toughest test. Maybe Penguin comes in and thinks there's more money to be made on a crime-ridden Gotham than on a safe and clean Gotham. Or maybe it's the opposite -- he helps make Gotham into a cleaner and safer city a la New York city in the 90s, but uses illegal worse-than-Giuliani-style tactics to make it happen. This, of course, draws a conflicted response from our hero. And since Nolan and Co. like making social and political commentaries, I think it's not too big a stretch to think they'd like to turn their attention to the excesses of corporatism.

I don't know, obviously. I'm just spitballing here. Anyone else got an idea?

"The Dark Knight"

2008-07-31T09:10:00.001-04:00

I don't know if I can really be objective about "The Dark Knight," Christopher Nolan's sequel to "Batman Begins."

The original "Batman," released in the summer of 1989, back when I was an impressionable 12 years old, cemented my lifelong movie habit. Everything about that movie combined to create a cinematic punch to my overlarge adolescent head. I'd always considered becoming Batman a legitimate career choice, but after seeing Michael Keaton stand on the top of that building at the end of the movie with the bat signal blazing in the clouds behind him, I kind of just wanted to be the guy who made others feel the way I was feeling at that moment. So I've got a soft spot for Batman. Two hours of Batman reading "The Great Gatsby" would probably get a thumbs up from me.

That said, if the original "Batman" was a punch to the head, "The Dark Knight" was a hard, teeth-shattering kick to the teeth. This movie kicked my ass and hard. I loved every second of this thing.

And this one's been a long time coming. After 2 highly disappointing misfires and one godawful bomb so bad that it sunk an otherwise talented director's career, 2005's "Batman Begins" was kind of miraculous. It was the Batman movie we'd all imagined but hadn't thought possible: a summer action spectacle that doubled as a studio prestige picture. The budget, the director, the actors -- everything about the project bespoke its seriousness of purpose, (which included making a seriously entertaining movie). But after it was over, I was almost more excited about the possibility of the next film as I was about the movie I'd just seen. If all went well, then a true Batman movie was in the offing. The sequel would involve no obligatory rehashing of the tired Batman origin story. In this potential sequel, the filmmakers could devote all of their energies to create a straight-forward Batman film that could explore all the dark themes and moral complexity hinted at in the first film. It was a lot to hope for, and so I waited to see what Nolan would do with the next installment.

Nolan delivered. "The Dark Knight" is dark, epic, exciting, mesmerizing, and smart.

So I loved the movie, but I admit there were a few things working in my favor. 1.) I saw it in IMAX. 2.) I actually had fairly low expectations for Heath Ledger's performance.

As to 1.) sections of "The Dark Knight" were filmed in IMAX. To my knowledge, this is a first for a theatrical 35MM/IMAX co-release. The bank heist sequence that opens the film, for instance, is shot entirely using IMAX equipment.

[Commence IMAX monologue.] After seeing this film, I now firmly believe that each and every multiplex should begin construction of at least one IMAX theater, with the eventual goal of converting all theaters currently showing films in 35mm to the IMAX format. I know I'm parroting IMAX's CEO here, but IMAX truly is how films should be seen. When a movie that's already brilliant is playing on an 8-story screen, and when that 8-story screen is filled with, variously, sexy Chicago architecture, sweeping helicopter shots of almost completely vertical Hong Kong, or a head to toe view of a man we'll come to know as the Joker waiting on the street corner, a clown mask dangling from one hand, it's like a shot of pure cinematic adrenaline. So, in all honesty, I don't know if this movie would have kicked me in the head so hard if it hadn't been on IMAX (even though I suspect the answer is probably yes). [End of IMAX monologue.]

So that was one thing going in my favor. The other, as I said, was that I didn't think I was going to get blown away by Heath Ledger as the Joker. I thought his performance in "Brokeback Mountain" was overrated--the gravelly, constricted-throat voice he used was so strange that instead of selling me on the character's reality it just made me wonder again and again what Ledger was going for with it. I thought the rapturous response to Ledger's Joker was probably another overreaction, likely heightened by his tragic and untimely death.

Not so. Heath Ledger's performance is everything you've heard. Just like I didn't forget that Heath was playing a part in "Brokeback," I completely forgot Heath was playing a part while I watched him be the Joker. And it is Ledger's Joker, more than any other component of the film, that makes "The Dark Knight" as good as it is, and in my view, it is very very good.

I think "The Dark Knight" is easily the best Batman film made to date, and I also think that, if Nolan signs on for the third (and why wouldn't he with the cash Warner Bros. is going to throw his way?), he could potentially finish this thing off as the brains behind one of the greatest trilogies ever filmed. For the first time in some time, the filmmakers have used the 2nd film of a trilogy as the 2nd act of a larger overarching story, just as "Empire Strikes Back" did so well about 25 years ago. The film ends in a dark place, with Batman locked into this character he's created for longer than he'd hoped, and worse, vulnerable now to both cop and criminal as he works to clean up Gotham.

Here are a few of the specific moments from the movie that I loved:

1.) Batman doing his no-neck swagger to the edge of the parking deck in the Scarecrow sequence, and then later asking Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) to make him a costume that will let him turn his head. This has been a "thing" in all the Batman movies to date, and here Nolan addresses it right out in the open, and then incorporates it into the story.

2.) The very awesome William Fichtner shotgunning clowns as a mob-bank manager.

3.) The Joker's off-hand use of a machine pistol to kill the school-bus driver.

4.) The mayor's eyeliner.

5.) The thump of the dead Batman-imposter as he hits the window outside the Mayor's office. Scared the hell out of me.

6.) One of the coolest movie moments in recent memory: Joker's use of a pencil as a murder weapon. Not in recent memory has 5 seconds of film managed to accomplish so much. In one shocking moment, we learn that the Joker a.) likes a good magic trick, b.) really just wants to entertain, and c.) even when surrounded by cold-blooded killers, the Joker is always the most dangerous guy in the room.

7.) The Joker's glare as he backward-kicks his way out of the crime-boss meet.

8.) Christian Bale's one-hand-in-the-pocket GQ-stroll as he walks coolly away from Maggie Gyllenhaal in his penthouse apartment.

9.) Christian Bale's total douchebag entrance into Harvey Dent's fundraiser. This guy's a pro-- there's no limit to how callous and vapid he'll pretend to be just so no one ever thinks he could possibly be Batman. Major dedication.

10.) When the first henchman tries to take off the mask of the unconscious Batman and gets electrocuted, the Joker laughs, kicks his own downed man, does an impersonation of what the guy had looked like getting electrocuted, and then spits on the guy. Freaking brilliant.

11.) Bruce Wayne's quick, no-look disassembly of a bad guy's shotgun.

12.) The way the sound cuts out and the music gets low as the police convoy carrying Harvey Dent to county heads out of police headquarters.

13.) When the lights cut on in the interrogation room and Batman is standing behind the Joker. Also: that entire scene. Also: the fact that I got to see Batman beating the hell out of the Joker in an interrogation room in a movie. How awesome is that?

Obviously, I could go on and on (I know -- I already have), and I'm not even hitting a lot of the obvious stuff (like the entire Singapore sequence, or Joker in a red wig and a goddamn nurse's outfit.) But I know there are some "Dark Knight" doubters out there, and after having read some of their critiques of the film, I have to say that they do have, in a few instances, valid points.

Some of the stuff I wasn't too hot for:
1.) The rooftop ending with the Joker. Seemed to kind of end with a writerly bit of dialogue from the Joker on the nature of their relationship. It was kinda cool, what he said, but maybe a little professorial for a guy who'd just rather get on with it than talk about getting on with it.

2.) Since when are dogs Batman's nemesis? They seemed to be in this movie. On second thought, maybe that's cool because, if there really WAS a crime-fighting Batman-type guy out in the world, sans gun, wearing bulletproof armor and enough moves to put down a knife-wielder in seconds, maybe a hungry rottweiler is the thing most likely to worry you. But then again, attack dogs don't seem to play so great in movies. Too many edits.

3.) Harvey Dent's tortured Two-Face logic. By the end of his scene with Gordon and the wife and kids, I didn't know what the hell Two-Face was after; I doubt he did. Maybe I just didn't believe that a guy that looks like Aaron Eckhart would get that worked up over Maggie Gyllenhaal. Yeah, I guess that's it.

But even these little imperfections didn't much phase me while I was watching the movie. Even when certain moments weren't quite working perfectly, I think Nolan crafted the movie to build in such a way that the forward momentum carried him through those moments.

Bottom line, "The Dark Knight" was a blast, and I walked out of that giant IMAX theater with a Joker-brand smile on my face. I loved "Iron Man," and I liked "Wall-E," but "Dark Knight" has my vote hands down for movie of the summer, and will no doubt be most fun movie of the year. I think it may be too geeky to say this could be the movie of the year -- hopefully something that fits that bill will come out before year's end (I'm hoping "The Road" ends up in the running for that)-- but I doubt I'll have a better time at the movies this year or next, or for quite a while. Probably not until the next Nolan-directed Batman movie comes out.

The Times they Are A'Changin'

2008-07-29T08:30:00.000-04:00

Just another sign that the era of incuriosity and thoughtlessness in the White House is nearly over.

Presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama is wrapping up his international tour in London this weekend. After talking to P.M. Gordon Brown, he spoke with the conservative party leader and likely next P.M. of Great Britain David Cameron. Some of their private conversation was caught on tape. Mental midgets, these men are not:

"Do you have a break at all?" asked Cameron.

"I have not," said Obama. "I am going to take a week in August. But I agree with you that somebody, somebody who had worked in the White House who -- not Clinton himself, but somebody who had been close to the process -- said that, should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you're doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be -- "

"These guys just chalk your diary up," said Cameron, referring to a packed schedule.

"Right," Obama said. "In 15 minute increments …"

"We call it the dentist's waiting room," Cameron said. "You have to scrap that because you've got to have time."

"And, well, and you start making mistakes," Obama said, "or you lose the big picture. Or you lose a sense of, I think you lose a feel-- "

"Your feeling," interrupted Cameron. "And that is exactly what politics is all about. The judgment you bring to make decisions."

"That's exactly right," Obama said. "And the truth is that we've got a bunch of smart people, I think, who know ten times more than we do about the specifics of the topics. And so if what you're trying to do is micromanage and solve everything then you end up being a dilettante but you have to have enough knowledge to make good judgments about the choices that are presented to you."

A bit different from the private conversations caught on tape of our current President during the general election campaign of 2000. Like, "That's the reporter from the New York Times. A real ass-hole."

"W." Teaser Unveiled

2008-07-28T08:30:00.000-04:00

Here's the new teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W."

Pretty basic. It introduces each of the major players in the Bush White House as they're played by all the various actors. The make-up is all convincing enough to take us along for the ride, I think, but hearing mostly from James Cromwell in this teaser, I get the impression that none of the actors are going to be doing an "impression" of the people they're portraying. My hunch is that if "W." plays like other excellent presidential biopics have played, the actor's portrayal of the actual historical figure will burn brighter than one's memories of, or imaginings of said people. Happened to me when I saw Hopkins play Nixon; also happened when I saw Paul Giamatti in "John Adams." If Brolin does as well as he's capable playing George W. Bush, the very same could be possible here.

Which is one tall order, because W. is one larger than life ass-hole. At the very least I'm expecting a fun movie.

Harwell Begins (a Blog). Also: A Feat of Filmed Entertainment

2008-07-23T08:25:00.001-04:00

It's funny how fast a blog gets stale. When I leave the same post up for, let's say a week, returning to the blog to find the same old post still there elicits two different emotions simultaneously. One: embarrassment. "That's what everyone's been looking at for a week? That old post?! Terrible!" And Two: Surprise. "It's been a whole week since I put that up? I just wrote that!"

Anyway. I'll move on.

Exciting news. Friend of the Blog, Shawn Harwell has gone and got himself a blog. You can visit it here. It's called Holepuncher, which, as titles go, is just about perfect for a blog. At first hearing, it sounds kinda dirty, but when you think about it a bit, it's only a little dirty, but also not dirty. What, after all, could be more wholesome than a 3-hole punch? It's a tricksy title. The blog itself is all about music you'll probably like.

In other news, something momentous happened in the world of film last week. A bit of filmed entertainment about superheroes and super villains held those who saw it enthralled in theaters nationwide. And, as an example of the artistic medium in which it was produced, it's unlikely to be surpassed this year.

Of course I'm referring to the trailer for Zach Snyder's upcoming "Watchmen."

The last time a trailer this brilliant showed up, it was for another Zach Snyder movie, "300." The guy's cornering the market on one of my favorite art forms: the movie trailer. I still think the "Thin Red Line" teaser is probably the best trailer ever filmed (with the teaser for the original "Alien" a respectable second), but this new "Watchmen" trailer is instantly worthy of their company. Damn if Snyder (or the trailer-producing company he employs) doesn't pick the coolest out-of-left-field songs to accompany their pulse-quickening visuals. Last time it was the un-famous Trent Reznor joint, "Just as You Imagined" that served as the soundtrack for ripped Spartans baring their teeth and flexing their pecs. This time it's a latter-day Smashing Pumpkins track entitled "The Beginning is the End is the Beginning" that pounds in the background while certain costumed superheroes are created and others are thrown out of windows. I've listened to the song a few times -- not enough to have memorized the lyrics, but enough times to see how certain lines reflect the story with an uncanny feeling for the tone of the book. Bleak kind of pulses off of the song, but there's an underlying sense of wonder informing some beats in the song that Snyder must have picked up on because he exploits it perfectly, particularly in the scenes featuring the all-powerful (and all-blue) Dr. Manhattan. One thing that's so impressive about the melding of the visuals and music is how Snyder doesn't chop up the song to get what he needs emotionally from the trailer. He uses the best parts of the entire song and doesn't rush through to the "good part" for the big build. He lets the lyrics play, and he cuts the trailer to the song's structure, and it works like gangbusters.

This teaser/trailer promises an extraordinary movie. It looks like Zach Snyder cut a big seam in the soul of the book, crawled inside and directed a film from inside of it for a few months. I've heard that the climax of the book may have suffered some alteration in the transition from page to screen, and if they veer too far from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's vision here, then I think they'll be undermining their otherwise heroic efforts to turn an "unfilmable" graphic novel into a movie, but as to some of the other dicier aspects of the book, cinematically-speaking, it seems clear that Snyder's shying away from nothing. There's even a shot of Dr. Manhattan floating above the floor of what looks to be a cafeteria with his own Dr. Manhattan plain for all to see (though slightly obscured by after-effects). Ballsy. (No pun intended.)

And for me, the last image in this trailer promises a Mars sequence in the finished film that should be as transporting and awe-inspiring as it's always been in the "Watchmen" movie that's been playing in my head ever since I finished the book. Everything seems to be turning up roses at the multiplex for fans of comics these days. Hope it keeps up through March of next year.

New York Times: Out of Touch Much?

2008-07-11T18:55:00.004-04:00

Finally! Someone sees some benefit to those pesky second homes!

Visit the Set of "The Shining"

2008-07-10T12:01:00.000-04:00

For anyone who loves Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" as much as I do, this is a must-see video.

Here's the lede from the Guardian story:

"Channel 4 has painstakingly recreated the set of Stanley Kubrick horror film The Shining, complete with look-a-likes of the crew and cast members including Shelley Duvall, for a TV ad to promote a More 4 season of the director's films."

The shot, a single tracking shot we used to call "fluid masters" back in film school, is meant to suggest a purposefully-striding Stanley Kubrick visiting all corners of his vast "Shining" set. The shot isn't visually stunning (fluid masters rarely are), but what is astonishing is how much attention to detail the creators of this short film paid to every aspect of the recreation. Even the crew members shown in the famed behind-the-scenes documentary of "The Shining" (filmed by Kubrick's daughter), are represented here with look-alikes. An appearance by a convincing double of Diane Johnson, Kubrick's co-screenwriter on the film, ends the film, right down to the big glasses and loud, wide-collared shirt she wore. After watching it and the good geek-vibes wore off, I wondered what had happened to the painstakingly-created set they'd built. Was it really intended solely for this 30-second shot? Would other stuff shot on that set turn up when Channel 4 aired the movie during the "Stanley Kubrick Season?"

I guess it's goofy to fret about the destruction of movie sets -- they tore down the set for the original "Shining," after all. But in the back of my mind I just marvel at the uses for such a set that are soooo much better than a dumpster.

Interested parties could ship parts of it to the hotel in Oregon where they shot the exteriors of the Overlook, making the hotel into a "Shining" museum, which would of course become a mecca for movie nerds all over the world. Or some enterprising Grogg-types could ship it to a fledgling film school. How much more hyped would we would be-matriculators have been if, in addition to a really loud screening of the T-Rec scene from "Jurassic Park," we'd also gotten to tour a recreated "Shining" set. And then they'd said, "Your first projects will all be filmed here." Old NCSA SoF would have had to bat film wannabes away with sticks.

Anyway, check it out. It's good stuff.

Hints of Impending Hilarity

2008-07-09T12:01:00.000-04:00

The Smoking Gun has a report up from the "set" of the new Sasha Baron Cohen movie starring his "gay, Austrian journalist" character, Bruno.

It already sounds hilarious:

"Cohen and his confederates organized cage fighting programs on consecutive days in Texarkana and Fort Smith. Both cards ended with two male grapplers (one was identified as "Straight Dave" and wore camouflage) tearing each other's clothes off and, while in underwear, kissing down their opponent's chest. This man-on-man action triggered Fort Smith fans to throw chairs and beer at the ring, according to one cop present at the city's Convention Center."

I'm not a huge fan of Cohen's methods, and sometime I think they undercut his humor, but when it works, it works brilliantly. This sounds promising.

"The Day the Earth Stood Still" Teaser

2008-07-08T12:01:00.000-04:00

The teaser for the remake of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" is up. What do you think?

I like the almost over-the-top nerdiness of the guy administering the lie-detector test, I like seeing Kathy Bates acting in stuff that's not totally beneath her ("Waterboy" is a good example), and I like the guy telling Jennifer Connelly, "Don't be afraid," as though he's talking as much to himself as to her. But I'm not sold on Keanu Reeves playing an alien. Isn't he too much identified with his other iconic and not terribly-demanding film roles to believably play a scary alien? Particularly one as relatively well-known as Klaatu? (So well-known, so embedded in the zeitgeist that I lifted the name for my own book when I needed an other-worldly-sounding name! And I haven't even seen the original movie! Something else to change.) Something seems off about this thing. As it is a teaser, it's meant to give only enough information to raise questions in the viewer's head they'll want to learn the answers to on opening weekend. But does it do even that? I'm kind of thinking not so much.

Does the teaser do anything for those who've seen the original movie? Are the big, sweeping CG shots of what look like highly-corrosive dust-storms of particular interest because they're alluded to in the original, but never shown? I'll withhold judgment until I see the full trailer, but color me unenthused by this.

Back from Charleston and a Question Regarding "Hancock"

2008-07-07T12:01:00.000-04:00

Hello all. Hope everyone had a great 4th of July weekend.

The wife and I are back from our weekend stay in Charleston, South Carolina. We watched fireworks (shot off the deck of the USS Yorktown), ate shrimp (at the touristy and so-so Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.), bought books (at Charleston's sole used bookstore, the very charming Blue Bicycle Books), and ate amazing seafood (courtesy of Hyman's Seafood). Yeah, mostly we ate. What of it? We walked, drove, read and ate, but it was fun and felt like just what I needed to face another month at work.

I read in the short time I've been back that the new Will Smith movie, "Hancock" did crazy business over the holiday weekend, earning $107 million over the 5 and 1/2 days since it opened. According to Nikke Finke's article, the reviews were only 33% positive and the "buzz" only "so-so" -- so why the massive total? I heard the studio was shooting some very last minute reshoots after some worrisome test screenings and there was some serious fretting amongst executives that this was just not a very good movie, but I guess none of that trickled down to audiences.

Is it just Will Smith that packs him in? Is Will Smith the last movie star? Meaning is he the only guy or gal left who can pack them in and make serious cash for a studio no matter what movie he's opening? It sure seems like it. So was it the premise that brought everyone out? Was it the generally good weather and nothing much else to do on a hot holiday weekend? Or was it just Will Smith? I have to ask these critical questions because I like to blog about movies, and I haven't actually seen one in the theater for a record 2 weeks. I still haven't checked out "Wall-E," "Wanted," or even "Iron Man" for a second time, which I'd kind of wanted to do. Damn you job that demands the not-explicitly-asked-for-but-just-kind-of-understood-that-everyone-works-overtime overtime! I'm hoping to get to the theater sometime this week -- if I do, I'll say something about it right here. Stay ... signed on?

Happy Fourth of July

2008-07-04T12:01:00.000-04:00

Happy Independence Day! If all goes according to plan, I'll be watching fireworks up in lovely Charleston, South Carolina tonight after having eaten a bunch of seafood and buying a ridiculous number of books I'll never have time to read. Should be fun. I hope everyone has a great weekend.

A Frozen Moment Post-Clinching, Pre-Shifting

2008-07-03T12:01:00.000-04:00

I meant to post up about this, but forgot about it till now.

This is a really cool shot from the Detroit Free Press of the Obama rally where Al Gore officially endorsed Barack Obama for president. I'm actually as impressed by the coolness of the 360 degree aspect as by the hugeness of the crowd. I was a little disappointed that Al Gore waited until his endorsement would have no actual impact to endorse Barack, but better late than never.

Brolin's Bush Looks Scary

2008-07-02T12:01:00.001-04:00

Um, is this one of the scariest photos ever taken, or is it just me? Why exactly does Josh Brolin's head look so enormous in this shot? It's almost like the thing Mike Myers did in the trailers I saw for "The Love Guru" where Myers put his own massive head on a kid's body for a flashback. Just weird.

In the article Brolin and Stone talk about how fairly their film treats our duly selected president. Brolin says that had the screenplay been what he expected it to be, a "far-left hammering of the president," as he puts it, then he wouldn't have done it. I think it's good that the movie won't be that. If done well, a fair and generally honest treatment of W. won't spend 2 hours showing what a despicable person George W. Bush is, but rather how his life's experiences drove him to seek the highest office in the land, but also shaped him into a person almost entirely unsuited to it. This is another one I'm looking forward to.

Questions

2008-07-01T12:01:00.001-04:00

Obama's the nominee. Hillary wrapped up her campaign, made nice, gave a totally adequate concession speech, and then threw her full weight behind Obama's candidacy at a rally.

In the last couple of weeks, though, Obama's started to make some moves to the center that have been somewhat worrisome to his more progressive supporters.

1.) While he's always seemed somewhat ambivalent about NAFTA, he always skewed his rhetoric towards opposing it. Now his rhetoric has shifted so that he doesn't really see what the big deal about NAFTA is.

2.) In years past he appeared to support the right of cities to ban handgun ownership, but after the Supreme Court affirmed the right of the citizen to bear arms last week, Obama's come out in support of the decision.

3.) In Illinois, he was part of the commission that halted Illinois's capital punishment regime. Last week when the Supreme Court decided that any crime that does not result in death does not warrant the death penalty (the crime at issue being child rape), Obama came out in opposition to the decision, saying the State should have the right to execute child rapists.

4.) Before, he said he'd filibuster any bill that contained a provision for immunity from prosecution for the telecommunications companies complicit in the government's illegal wiretapping program. Now, he has come out in support of a compromise bill that contains exactly that immunity.

5.) Before he didn't wear that goddamn flag lapel pin because he knew it was cheap, meaningless, and stupid. When someone's running for office, particularly for the highest office in the land, isn't that person's "patriotism" beyond reproach? Has anyone who's ever been accused of not being patriotic enough during an election season actually not loved their country? And who gets to define patriotism? Republicans? Obama showed all of that political silly season stupidity the door. Except ... As you can see in his photo from the cover of Rolling Stone, he's started to wear the flag pin regularly.

My question is this: how much of these shifts are necessary to win the general election, and how much do these shifts to the center dilute his powerful brand?

For myself, the places Obama has shifted to don't bother me much. NAFTA's never been much of an issue for me. I'd have to read about 5 dry economics books to understand half of what people are arguing about, and I'm not interested enough in the issue to do that. I also supported the Supreme Court's decision to decriminalize posession of firearms in one's own home, so Obama's new position is pretty much in line with my own. As for the capital punishment decision the Supreme Court handed down last week, I agreed with it, but I understand that as political theater, it's probably better for a candidate to come down on the side of killing child rapists than to oppose it, no matter their governmental philosophy. But the telecom immunity shift does bother me -- I think we need to know as much as we can about this illegal breach of citizen privacy and now Obama's said, in effect, that no, we don't. And the flag pin, well, that's just disappointing.

The cumulative effect of all this shifting is that I don't feel confident I know where Obama stands on any given issue anymore. On the flip side, I no longer doubt that he has the steely resolve required to win and to govern a divided nation. He's no Jimmy Carter, no McGovern. He's more like JFK. Thoughtful, liberal, but ruthless.

Though I still think Obama's a fantastic politician and one of the best candidates I've had the chance to vote for, I am a little worried that his recent shifts to the center and to the center-right aren't over, and that in his zeal to win over independents he's going to alienate his base and end up being the president we all knew Hillary would have been: just another poll-driven centrist. I hope I look back on this post in a few months and laugh at how alarmist and knee-jerk I was. All I can do is continue to watch and hope.

Blog Update and My Current Art-Crush: "Sweeney Todd"

2008-06-30T12:01:00.000-04:00

Man was that book post getting old. You'd think I shut this blog down it was up there so long.

As you all know I've been working at a 9-5 job for the first time in 3 years. It's actually an 8:30 to 6:30-7 job, but who's counting hours? When I wasn't working I really had no excuse not to post up a little something every day or every other day. But now it's gotten to be a legitimately difficult thing to find time to do. With my former oceans of spare time, I was able to read a shitload of books, blog, and even write a little. Now that those oceans of spare time have drained to puddles, I have to be more discriminating as to how I spend my time.

But I am quite hesitant to shut this thing down. I've gotten twice as much out of it as I've put into it, and I'm loathe to abandon a venue where I can have discussions about movies, politics and whatever else with my friends and random websurfers who've stumbled over it. So, it may seem shut down from time to time, and a time may be coming when I'll just have to level with myself that blogging is one of those things that has to go by the wayside for a while, but today's not that day. It's Sunday, it's prime writing time and I feel like procrastinating. So it's blogging time.

So here's one thing that's been going on:

1.) Me and the wife went to Atlanta's famed Fox theater some weeks back to see the latest staging of Stephen Sondheim's musical, "Sweeney Todd." I'd seen the movie late last year and thought it was a mixed bag. I thought the visuals were stunning, but overall it kind of bored me. I was excited to see the musical live, but, as with the movie, I was left unmoved and a little bored with the show itself. But then those goddamn songs wouldn't get out of my head. Tired of hearing annoying snippets sound again and again in my head while at work, I bought the original cast recording from the Broadway production.

Now I kind of love it. I've been listening to it a lot. The story, the interpretation, the songs, the whole deal. All the excesses of musical theater that have always bothered me, the homely melodies, the undemanding singing, the overcooked acting, all seem to work in "Sweeney Todd"'s favor. Maybe because the musical's plot is more operatic than most, having everything be a bit overdone kind of makes sense. Or maybe because a story about a barber who slits throats and puts the corpses into meat pies for hungry Londoners makes up for a lot of the usual musical goofiness. Now I want to know the entire story of Sweeney Todd. How and where it originated, how it developed from a novel to a play to musical, how the idea to reinterpret the story occurred to Stephen Sondheim, what were its influences, what did he see going on in the world when he was writing it that pushed him to make it so dark and pessimistic?

I scanned a bit of the "book" that started it all at Borders the other day, and found that it originated in the 19th century and was originally published as a serial in 4 parts. Most of the hallmarks of the story were present in its original incarnation (the 2nd story barbershop, the pie shop below, the trick barber's chair, the cannibalism) but there must be some mystery as to its author because the cover made no mention of the writer, only a compiling editor. I could have bought the book and answered some of these questions for myself, but the edition looked like a novelization of the screenplay (even though it wasn't), complete with movie poster cover, and I couldn't bear to mar my shelves with such an ugly book. Maybe I'll look for a more respectable edition on eBay.

One last thing: While looking for a good "Sweeney Todd" image to use, I stumbled on this, a full list of all productions of Sondheim's musical complete with full casts over the years. In the first production on the list, Angela Lansbury played Ms. Lovett. Weird, huh?

Mmm, books.

2008-06-02T22:25:00.002-04:00

This guy likes him some books. I'm not as compulsive as he is (I don't have 5 copies of anything, for instance), but I can't help but admire his collection, as pictured here. I like how unfussy it is. No clear, library-style book covers on anything. Just books. But a lot to read. That's actually one of the least cool things about working again: my reading time has been mercilessly reduced. Now that "Lost" is over, maybe I can catch up a little. (BTW, wasn't that an excellent season finale?) Well, I've got to get some reading in before I hit the hay. I'm into a new thriller called "Child 44." So far, very good, and one of the most frightening books set in an oppressive, totalitarian-governed country since "1984." If you've got some extra bucks and some time, pick it up, check it out.

Some Early "Hobbit" Movie News

2008-05-28T12:01:00.000-04:00

Back when it was news, I was disappointed to learn Peter Jackson would forego the chance to direct both "The Hobbbit" (and a second, as-of-yet untitled film that will connect "The Hobbit" and LOTR), and opt instead to produce a Guillermo Del Toro-directed version of Tolkein's children's story. Sigh.

Now Guillermo's not bad. He directed the more-than-decent "Hellboy," as well as the critically-lauded (but way overrated) "Pan's Labyrinth," so odds are he's not going to mess this thing up. But as a film geek and "LOTR" fanboy, you can't help but wish Jackson would return to the director's chair to give all five movies a kind of directorial consistency. If it ain't broke and all that. Anyway. It is what it is, and though Jackson's sitting this one out, I'm definitely interested to see the Guillermo and WETA come up with.

To that end, Guillermo and Peter Jackson recently did a webchat where they answered 20 questions from readers about the upcoming production. Some of the questions are from fans who aren't well-versed in the ins and outs of filmmaking (like the fan who asked Guillermo and Jackson, before a word of script has been written, if there would be an extended version of the movies a la LOTR), but there are some interesting tidbits about who's returning, how the creative team's going to work, and when we might expect these movies to hit theaters. But in light of the high phony-quotient in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," I thought this exchange was interesting:


WetaHost	20 - Will you be doing less location shooting this time because your set builders, digital effects teams etc have become so proficient?
Peter Jackson	Middle-earth is location, with very few structures really. It's a natural countryside and that's where a lot of shooting will take place.
Guillermo del Toro	Location will be favored and real set construction.
Guillermo del Toro	I love REAL set construction and think that sets are very important part of the storytelling and scope of a film...

Real people doing actual things in real places. How novel. So that's heartening. But this is not a near-term thing by any stretch. Here's what they said about their schedule for production:

Dear Jesslyn - at this point in time the plan is to write for the rest of this year and start early conceptual designs. 2009 will be dedicated to pre-production on both movies and 2010 will be the year we shoot both films back to back. Post productin follows one film at a time with The Hobbit being released Dec 2011, and F2 release Dec 2012. That is the schedule in about as much detail as we have ourselves at the moment.

So about 3 years before we can buy a ticket to the first one, and 4 before the second. Jackson and New Line took their time with LOTR, so the fact they're taking it slow with these two new movies is encouraging.