My sci-fi crew!

You scored as Serenity (from Firefly). You like to live your own way and do not enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you that you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you.

Serenity (from Firefly)		94%
Millennium Falcon (from Star Wars)		81%
Moya (from Farscape)		75%
SG-1 (from Stargate)		75%
Bebop (from Cowboy Bebop)		63%
Galactica (from Battlestar: Galactica)		63%
Enterprise D (from Star Trek)		56%
Nebuchadnezzar (from The Matrix)		56%

Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? v1.0
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Offside, the movie

This looks so cool. And since it's old news to much of the world, yet still Coming Soon to the United States, here's a review.

Those who underestimate the power of comedy to topple empires do so at their own peril. Betcha not one mullah in Iran is laughing.

Ding dong, he's dead

Rumor has it that Saddam Hussein has been hanged from the neck until dead, dead, dead. I have something to say about that: Hurrah!

I am a reluctant supporter of the death penalty. By "reluctant" I mean that I'd rather there was a better way of dealing with sociopaths and psychopaths. Some day we may be able to do something a la Babylon 5, and just wipe their evil personality away and replace it with something useful to the community. But alas, that day is far, far in the future.

I laughed outloud earlier this year reading an article in the New York Times. To paraphrase the headline: "For more and more, life imprisonment means dying in prison." The gist of the article was to express shock and dismay that someone sentenced to life imprisonment would actually (gasp) remain in prison for the rest of their life. It's that shock that reminds me to support the death penalty, because the plain fact is that your typical left-leaning moonbat would, at some point, release anyone from prison. Ah, the joy of Charles Manson once more wandering California....

Frankly I despise incarceration, so I'd prefer that anyone who received the glorious LWOPP, life without the possibility of parole, just be sentenced to death. Better to have finality.

And so I'm happier to see Saddam shuffled off this mortal coil. Bye, don't bother to wave, don't go away mad, don't go away in a huff, just go away.

This morning's Sacramento Bee had an obituary (not one I could find online, drat) that just reeked of sympathy. My favorite bit, a one sentence paragraph: "In 1979, Saddam became president of Iraq."

"Became." Such a gentle way of telling what happened.

He was an evil man who lived by club, gun, and sword. He died by the rope.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. I will shed no tears, I will lose not a moment's sleep. Ever thus to dictators.

Living in exile

Yeah, it's a minor gripe when compared to all the other crap in the world, but I've long thought I'm currently living in exile in the Sacramento region. I was born and raised in San Francisco, you see, and even after 20+ years I've not adapted to this alien valley existence.

Prime examples are that I have to wait another week to see Children of Men, which doesn't open until January 5, 2007, in Sacramento. And though today is the official opening day for Pan's Labyrinth, good luck in figuring out when it might pop up in my neck of the woods. Near as I can find out, "sometime in January 2007."

There aren't a lot of films that I care to go see at the theatre, but these were the top two for 2006. Now I have to wait until 2007. Days away, sure, but I told you up front, this is a minor (if annoying) gripe.

Lileks Looks Back at the Year to Come

A marvelous start:

History, a wise man said, is a pack of tricks we play on the dead. Very well: Let's get out the deck and deal. As we stand on the cusp of 2008, let's look back on the follies of 2007.

North Korea returned to the negotiating table and announced it wants a Playstation 3 and a ham sandwich. Also a pony. Talks broke up when the Americans refused to supply a Playstation because they bought North Korea an Xbox last time, and it just sat in the closet.

Laugh outloud funny. My favorite bit:

North Korea tested a nuclear bomb attached to a medium-range missile; it was headed towards a U.S. carrier group before it was destroyed. The United States subsequently tested several nuclear missiles on North Korean soil. The tests were successful.

Hee!

Superman Returns redux

When I first wrote about Superman Returns, I said I had the flu, skipped through it, and would really need to sit down and watch it start-to-finish. I thought I might need to have Kleenex handy.

Well I watched and no, I didn't need Kleenex. I did need caffeine, though, so luckily I had my Starbucks Barista Expresso Machine.

I stand behind most everything I wrote initially. The strongest part of film is that it offers no easy out of the threesome, Superman, Lois, and New Guy. The inner conflicts involved are nicely rendered, if never solved. I hope that Spider Man 3 does as well in this regard.

But now having seen the entire thing -- twice, mind you -- the overall feeling is...ugh. The entire Lex Luthor plot is as bad as I first thought. He's not a menacing villain, or even particularly funny. He's just...ridiculous. And he's surrounded by morons. No, seriously, genuine morons. Only Parker Posey does well, but then again, she always does. (Yeah, I've got a crush. Shoot me.)

And there's just a succession of little things that make me queasy. Like Luthor's shout of, "Bring it on!" Hmm, who is that supposed to represent? There's the vague messianic aspects of Superman here, where he tells Lois how she wrote that the world doesn't need a savior, yet he hears them calling out for one, every day. Savior? And his fall from high orbit is particular Christ-like.

Then, Superman is not Christ and, in this film, he's not even particularly noble. He spies on Lois at home, for crying out loud. Is this some allusion so some other aspect of our current world, or is Superman being reduced to a high school kid who wants the girl who probably doesn't want him so he's stalking her, yeah, that'll make her love him! I can see the sequel now, Superman: The Steel Stalker.

And so it goes. I still love Ottman's music, especially when he weaves in bits from the Williams' scores. For the most part the cinematography is spot on, though Metropolis was mostly a dull, dull looking place. The visual effects are notable for being...bland.

I need to single out the sequence with the Boeing 777 as particularly pathetic. It starts badly and just keeps getting worse. It also continues a trend from Jackson's King Kong, wherein the heroine is visibly subjected to gee-forces that should snap all her bones and turn her into a pretzel...yet her hair is only vaguely mussed. It's one thing to ask an audience to willingly suspend their sense of disbelief, it's another to abuse that willingness. Watching Jack Sparrow prance about a water wheel in a sword fight was more convincing.

So, at the end of the day, my overall feeling for Superman Returns is...feh. I'll stick with Christopher Reeve and the first two Supe films, plzthnkx (copyright Cleolinda of Movies in 15 Minutes).

Hey, about that HD format business...

Absolute brilliance:

Basically, what we have is a series of anti-consumer DRM infections masquerading as nothing in particular. They bring only net negatives to anyone dumb enough to pay money for them, and everything is better than these offerings. They sell in spite of the features they tout, not because of them. The manufacturers still have the balls to look you in the eye and say that they are selling because of the programs/features/DRM. Marketers, what a laugh riot.

In the end, every step in this chain of consumer woe that is Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, Live, VIIV, HDCP, MCE and Vista is flopping. And that is where the better choice comes in. The consumers have voted with their dollars, and are staying away in droves. All the walls of the walled gardens are being built higher and higher, with the occasional brick landing on the head of someone who pulls out a credit card. Buy now, there is a brick with your name on it whistling down, operators are standing by.

In the mean time, Piracy, the better choice (tm) flourishes.

I was thinking of adding to his piece, but why? He says it all so well. All I'll add is what I was discussing with my son on Christmas Day, that the HD disc players -- be they Blu-Ray or HD-DVD -- don't seem to be doing well, while players the "up-rez" current DVD's to near-HD specs are succeeding.

Gads, I love the free market. Now, if we can just keep government regulation out of the picture....

House Defense

I have recently become a House addict. Like the Vicodin-gobbling doctor, I can't get enough.

This addiction is difficult for me, since I don't subscribe to either cable or satellite, and I can't find an antenna good enough to allow me a decent television signal. So on a friend's recommendation I Netflix'd the first DVD of the first season. Once hooked, I moved on to purchase, and bought seasons one and two. Discs in hand, I had a mini-marathon. I've watched 'em all several times. Now I'm an addict.

To feed my habit, because I didn't want to wait for the next set of DVD's, I deployed a bit torrent client and snaked down the first ten episodes of season three. Doing this will tide me over until the DVD release of the entire season. I feel like I'm on maintenance at some rehab clinic, since it appears the series is on Christmas hiatus.

Damnit.

Hugh Laurie does a brilliant job being a complete asshole of a doctor, who happens to have the insufferable habit of always being right. Everyone else in the show is equally well done. It's the best bit of casting and acting I've seen since Homicide.

But that's all old news, and I'm late to the party. So let's focus on Detective Tritter and his persecution of Dr. House. David Morse is spot on perfect as Tritter. He's House, if House had chosen to be a cop rather than a doctor. He is just as relentless, just as sarcastic, just as unapologetic, and he's just as much of a bully as House. He is, in short, House's perfect foil. He is also, at this moment, kicking House's ass.

Tritter's absorption into establishing House's "guilt" echoes a Florida DA's pursuit of Rush Limbaugh a few years ago. There, as here, you were dealing with someone addicted to pain medication. There, as here, the only "victim" is the addict. And there, as here, the police motive seems more than just the pursuit of justice, no matter what the investigator(s) might claim.

Much of how Tritter handles his investigation is spot on to the real world, but parts don't work. While the hospital might insist that House get his own criminal defense attorney, there is no way they'd tolerate how Tritter was threatening Wilson and the others. There's no way the hospital's legal staff wouldn't fight on Wilson's behalf because Wilson is the head of the oncology department. Wilson wouldn't have to hire anyone, Cuddy and the hospital would swing to his defense.

Ditto House's staff. Tritter's tactics work well against mob bosses and their staff because they're all criminals. They are less effective against the innocent. They are the sort of tactics that transform prosecution into persecution. You get a hint of that persecution when Tritter pontificates that they [the staff] are all guilty because they facilitate House's conduct. That's the language of someone dealing in absolutes, not truth or justice.

But crossing that line is what makes Tritter interesting. House ignores, bends, and breaks rules all the time. Tritter is doing likewise. And since the show's writers routinely bend medical reality, it's to be expected that they'd also bend legal and law enforcement reality.

I just wish that one of those characters, whose brilliance has already been established, would respond to Tritter in an appropriate manner. Like Cuddy telling him that her legal staff will be all up and down Tritter's ass. Or House's criminal defense attorney could tell him. Preferably, it would be both. House has to fight these sorts of things all the time; let his alter ego go through the battles, too.

Because while House has clearly and unequivocally broken the law, in his television universe he gets results. Tritter bases his entire conduct on the theory that House will, at some future time, kill someone, but why doesn't someone tell him that while House may, in the future, harm or kill someone, he does, in the present, save lives? Also, in an episode from the first season, House presents the shocking truth that sometimes doctors screw up, which means that sometimes patients die. It just goes with the territory. Sort of like the reality of Tritter's universe, that sometimes the bad guy gets away with it, whatever "it" might be.

What makes this fascinating to me is the conflict at play. We're in the universe of television. On one side is House, whose methods always contradict some general rule of ethics, some arbitrary guideline, that every other doctor blindly follows. House willfully ignores them...to the benefit of his patient. His actions constantly challenge the conventional wisdom that puts such rules into place. He's a rebel and an outlaw, and by the rules of his television universe, he's always right.

Tritter also ignores arbitrary rules, and in his own universe I'll bet you he's also always right. We are, in short, witnessing the collision of two absolutes, the rebels in television land who ignore the rules that apply to all others. They ignore these rules and produce a good result.

In the 10th episode of the third season, a television universe compromise was on the table, one that would satisfy both sides of the conflict. But it didn't work, so the cliffhanger is that we're now on collision course. I'm worried that a show that, for the most part, hasn't blinked when it comes to tough decisions will now nod off. This might happen because this is House's medical world, not Tritter's police world, which means the cops have to lose in order for House to win. Chances are that loss will be some arbitrary and disappointing crock. I could be wrong; they might pull a rabbit out of their hat and I'll snort in glee.

Meanwhile, I wonder if they'll develop a new series just for Tritter, because I think I'd become addicted to that show, too.

The Da Vinci Coma

As I sit here listening to the Hans Zimmer's score for The Da Vinci Code, I'm wondering how to recover the hours of my life that were lost watching the film on DVD.

All right, that's pretty harsh, but it's praising with faint damnation to say that Tom Hanks was duller than dirt. Where the hell did that hair "style" come from? I know he can act, I've seen it, so what happened here? As for Ron Howard's "directing"...ugh. I'm not a big Howard fan anyway, but he's usually tolerable. I think his two most successful efforts were Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind. This mess is far off his usual game. For all involved, this film garners the question: What the hell happened?

And I haven't even gotten to the plot, yet. Wait, was there a plot?

Full disclosure: I was born and raised Catholic. My father was the product of a Jesuit education. I spent nine years with nuns as teachers, then one year with the Jesuits in high school, until I flunked Latin. My college degrees are from a Jesuit university. And yet until recently, I'd never sat down and read the Bible. Today I consider myself a C.S. Lewis Christian, a la Mere Christianity, which means that I accept the divinity and resurrection of Christ, consider myself a Christian, but I'm not attached to a given denomination of Christianity, Catholic or otherwise.

I am not going to take offense at someone challenging either my faith or the basic precepts of Christian belief. The core of a Jesuit education is that you challenge everything, including your beliefs and your faith. My father would run me ragged; Socrates would have been proud.

I've read the recommendation that The Da Vinci Code, the book, is best read as if it occurs in a science fiction alternate history universe. Read that way, you can ignore the legion of historical inaccuracies, never mind the theological misstatements, and enjoy a fun romp. I tried to read author Dan Brown's earlier book, Angels and Demons, and found it to be some of the worst writing on the face of the planet, with such a wild misunderstanding of science, the internet, and aviation that I never got to the religious aspects of it before tossing it across the room. I've yet to try and read his Da Vinci book, though I've browsed the highlights here and there. Brown's writing improved, but little else, near as I can see.

As for the movie, as adapted from the book by hack extraordinaire Akiva Goldman...ZOMGWTF?!?

Maybe I missed something, but even assuming all that is presented in the movie, that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene, they played bouncy, and at the crucifixion she was pregnant with His child...so what? It hasn't a thing to do with the divinity of Christ, and doesn't deny the resurrection at all. Yet everyone in the film runs around as though this would utterly destroy Christianity or, more specifically, the Catholic church. (Which is another whopper in the film, conflagrating the two, as if Christianity == the Catholic church alone, which I believe a few dozen other Christian denominations would find objectionable.) Since the central conflict of the film isn't a conflict at all, there's nothing to hang a much of a plot onto.

And I fell on the floor laughing when the film implied that the Roman Empire was somehow this benign, polytheistic political entity that only ran violently amuck when the monotheists (i.e., Christians) attacked and took over. Until that point, those poor Romans just peacefully worshipped the divine feminine and never mind all those thousands of years worth of invasion, conquest, oppression, slaughter, torture, and brutality. I imagined Hans Zimmer, as he was composing the score for Da Vinci, watching and listening to that scene and going, "Hey, fellas, a few years ago I did this other movie and, like, uh, it had a, hmmm, slightly different opinion about these Roman guys."

In short, the "history" within The Da Vinci Code -- what little that is comprehensible -- is laughably bad. It should have been a comedy, on a par with The History of the World: Part I. Instead, it's played with pompous, false sincerity. I kept comparing it to another recent film that romped through history, National Treasure. That film also played a little footloose and fancy-free with history but did so in a jovial, entertaining manner; it was thrilling and it was fun.

The Da Vinci Code is neither thrilling nor fun. It is pompous and obese, and as a result it's as dull as the day is long. Pretty much everyone in the film looks as though they're asleep. The action sequences are lessons in how not to do action sequences. The only trace of inventiveness is how Howard handles flashbacks, and they are especially effective when he layers them over present-day locations and actions. I especially liked how he handled Sir Isaac Newton's funeral as Hanks & Co. approach the cathedral, though a friend watching the film with me was thoroughly confused.

Zimmer continues the lessons from working with James Newton Howard on Batman Begins. That is, his score is relatively sedate, subdued, and nicely done. Excepting the choral bits, which are over the top, the music is the most emotional element in the film. Then again, I'm an unabashed Zimmer fan.

Alas, here endeth the compliments. I wonder if the film is as bad as it is because none of the cast and crew believed in the project. In National Treasure there's reverence and humility in Nicolas Cage's voice and acting because he believes, utterly and completely, in his quest. He is, in a word, passionate. Likewise, Tom Hanks is utterly convincing as the school teacher forced to lead men into bloody combat in Saving Private Ryan because he believed in the character, who he was, where he was, and what he was doing. Ditto all involved in making the film. There was passion on the part of all.

Here, in The Da Vinci Code, I don't think anyone believed a word that they were putting onto film, and it shows. At the end, when Hanks appears to close his eyes in prayer, you want to cringe. The entire film is lifeless, utterly devoid of any passion for anything other than, maybe, a paycheck. You could almost put a Dan Brown-like conspiratorial spin to it, that they deliberately made an awful film in order to bury The Gospels According to Brown. Too bad they failed, even in that, since Goldman is getting a record $4 million to adapt Angels and Demons to the big screen.

Oh, be still my beating heart.

Question: What is a bastard exactly?

Quite often we ask ourselves hard to answer questions, like, “What is a bastard?”

And we wax philosophic with metaphysical postulations, incomplete aphorisms, and inconsistent sophisms that make one more and more sure that the only true thing is that a picture is worth a thousand words.

In this photo, the guy on the right is a member of a bomb squad in the middle of a deactivation.

The guy behind him, well, he's a bastard.



[Received by email, original author unknown.]

Superman Returns...but why?

[Danger, Will Robinson, there be SPOILERS ahead!]

I've figured out the secret of Chinese films. They're all about love unfulfilled, love denied. They're all about unrequited love. Look at one of the best, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Chow Yun Fat is literally gasping his last before he finally admits his love for Michelle Yeoh. Look at poor Chen Chang, so desperately in love with Ziyi Zhang, and she's so desperately in denial that she literally takes a leap of faith at the end in order to -- we hope -- fulfill that love. You see similar patterns in Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and even Infernal Affairs. And 2046 just drips with lost love, love unfulfilled, unrequited love, etc.

I mention all that because in that regard, Superman Returns feels very Chinese. It is all about love denied; it is all about unrequited love.

Throughout his history, Superman has been plagued by his relationships with humans, especially -- but not exclusively -- with Lois Lane. The films have focused on Superman and Lois, to their benefit and detriment. Benefit because it is that tension that adds humanity to Superman; detriment in that they keep having to find a way to keep them apart, typically by making Lois forget what happened.

In Superman Returns, Brian Singer takes the issue head on and these are the moments during which his film soars. Oh, sure, there's a decent hammy performance by Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor, but who really gives a crap? He's going to lose. You know that going in. Is there anyone within the realm of the Great Cosmic All that believes Lex will ever win?

No? I didn't think so.

Superman Returns is the third Superman film, essentially creating a very decent trilogy. The previous thing labeled Superman III, and that other thing called Superman IV...Singer pretends they never happened. If you've never seen them, don't. If you have, head over to Rekall and have them wiped from your memory. You'll thank me for this.

So Singer has made the real Superman III. Superman, for whatever reason, sought to find out about his home world after defeating the evil General Zod and sending him hurtling into the pot of gurgling dry ice. He's been gone for around five years. Lots of things have changed. The world has adapted back to a Superman-less state. Lois is engaged to a striking young man who happens to be Perry White's son. She won a Pulitzer for an editorial titled "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman". Oh, and she has a son. Who is around five years old. HINT!

These clues are blunt instruments. Feeling jilted by Superman's sudden departure, dumped as it were, she hooks up with the boss's son. She pens a prize-winning essay where she rakes her ex over the coals. Oh, and she's got a son who -- by staggering coincidence -- is just old enough to have been conceived, oh, just shortly before Superman left.

All right, no subtlety there, but so what? As we learn when we cook, it's not just the ingredients you work with, it's how you work them. And with this set of ingredients Singer does very well. He wisely makes the New Guy a really nice, handsome, competent fellow. There's every reason in the world for Lois to legitimately love him, but she's having commitment issues. They're engaged but she won't set the date, won't take that final step.

She has, tada, Superman issues. And who shows up to really compound those issues? Damnit (for her), Superman returns!

Look, this can't be a complete review because I was watching most of this through a fever, fast-forwarding through the dull Lex stuff, and probably missing all sorts of silly details. Frank Langella seems a great Perry White. Kate Bosworth is much better at being Lois Lane than Katie Holmes was at being whatever she was in Batman Begins, but that's not saying much. It was great to see James Marsden's face, and as the New Guy, no less. Brandon Routh as the Man of Steel...well, maybe I'll get used to him. In time. Given the effort. Oh, and as much as I like Parker Posey, she (ahem) vamped things up much better in Blade: Trinity (can't believe I used that pun, for shame).

What stands out is how Singer wraps all this up at the end. By making New Guy a nice guy, a good guy, a great guy, Singer denies both Lois and Superman an easy out. New Guy even saves Lois and her son (albeit, with a final assist from Superman). By not killing New Guy, Singer again denies Lois (and Superman) an easy out. This triangle is holding firm and it hurts.

There are moments near the end that ring oh so damn true it's painful. Sure, we're looking at a fictional superhero, but the emotion behind it all is real and alive in the world today. You can see New Guy staring at Lois and he knows she's in love with Superman, and you know that if she said "I wanna go" he'd let her! You can see Lois longing for Superman but unable to leave New Guy because, well, it just can't work out with a superhero, can it? And you can see Superman staring at Lois and he knows he can't have her, that great human New Guy can take care of her...and the son.

I have to give special props, snaps, claps, applause, and recognition for one of the best things going for this entire sequence, the musical score by John Ottman. I said elsewhere that listening to the music of Casino Royale, it felt at times as though David Arnold (usually a, cough, blunt instrument) was channeling John Barry. For example, Arnold's orchestration of the Bond theme at the end of Casino is brilliant.

Ottman does the same here, only he's channeling John Williams. His orchestration and rendition of Williams' Superman theme is better than Williams did for himself. Unlike hacks who have taken tidbits of Williams' stuff for other sequels, Ottman uses that base material as pure inspiration. The result is a wonderfully done musical soundtrack.

On the album, the final track is "Reprise/Fly Away". I don't think it made it into the film, or the film got re-edited so that music didn't work anymore, but it is a thing of wonder to listen to. Ottman weaves his original music with Williams extracts, specifically "Can You Read My Mind", the love theme from Superman. What Ottman does that is so brilliant is that he gives hints of that theme, of that love, and then in the music, denies it. His own original music wants to swell in love and embrace and success...and then denies it. Dig up a copy of the soundtrack, listen to that last track, "Reprise/Fly Away". It's superb.

With Ottman's music, more than adequate visuals, clean editing, and damn little dialogue, Singer creates a powerful ending, saving what was, for a time, beginning to feel like something suffering Peter-Jackson-please-end-the-damn-film syndrome.

This is all just set up. I need to really sit down and watch the film. I suspect I'll have to have Kleenex handy. Call me sentimental, tell me that it hits hard because I'm still recovering from my own bout with unrequited love, but that only means Singer is, in fact, doing it perfect. He's touched a nerve with finesse and accuracy.

Now if only he had left all that Lex Luthor crap out of the film....