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Man on the Moon

38 years ago yesterday, we landed on the Moon. Ever since, the space program -- around the world -- has gone backwards. Almost immediately after Neil Armstrong transmitted, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. Eagle has landed", President Nixon started hacking at NASA's budget. Congress followed suit and that's been the trend and pattern ever since.

The engineering nightmare known as the space shuttle was the result, an under-funded, under-engineered, over-wrought, half-assed manned space vehicle that has never lived up to a single promise. Most stories in the press blame NASA but the real blame lies with the political leadership of the United States. NASA said the shuttle would cost X and Congress told NASA it could have three-fourths of X. NASA cowered and said, "Okay." Congress then gave them one-half X. On and on, asking for more while paying less. NASA's "fault" lay in never saying, "Well, that's not enough to make this thing work."

You can tell just how lousy the shuttle is by looking at its proposed replacement, the Ares (I, IV, and V) launch vehicle and the Orion crew capsule, which looks suspiciously like the very successful Saturn/Apollo combo.

Today the Moon is lost. Bush talks about returning, but there's no fire to the proclamation or the project. No one is trying to grab the public's imagination about space. It's as though the combined efforts of Star Trek and Star Wars were focused on making space boring. For many there's a sense of "been there, done that". Other trot out the old crap about how we must focus our efforts here on the ground before we return our attention to the stars.

Oh my and wow, that's inspirational.

Burt Rutan pegged it 100% when he said that NASA screwed the pooch when it dismissed the "Face on Mars" as a trick of light, shadows, and weather. If they had played it as a mystery to be solved NASA would have had funding for a hundred years.

We need a Delos D. Harriman, The Man Who Sold the Moon (by Robert A. Heinlein). We need that fire, that passion, that desire, and that obsession.

We live on a pale blue dot, floating in the vastness of space and time. Microscopic brains maintain we must focus on the here and now, but the Apollo program was a vision of the future. One that we turned away from.

I watched the US space program evolve as I grew up. It was a natural progression, from simple ballistic shells to the ability to travel to the Moon. It just required an application of national will. It seemed natural that having landed on the Moon we would exploit that knowledge. Something like the now-proposed Ares spacecraft would have been a natural, something larger and more capable than the Saturn.

The old adage is that once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere. The most difficult part of any space mission is getting off the planet, out of our gravity well. If we had continued to explore the Moon we would have had to develop a more permanent presence there. Once that was done, materials from the Moon could have been "dropped" into Earth orbit for building...anything. Much easier to drop from the Moon than lift off Earth.

Again, this would have required vision, dedication, and the will and desire to achieve. Instead, we walked away. Apollo 18 sits on the lawn in Houston, a fully operational Saturn V rocket unused and wasted.

I scan the news in vain to see something commemorating this date in history. Nothing. Ares and Orion are an effort to return us to where we were 38 years ago. Someone should take note. If all goes as planned, we'll have lost 50 years on our quest into space.

If.

I look around, listen to our national leaders, see the trend towards introspection toward no end, with no purpose other than narcissism, and a turning away from exploration, from the thrill of discovery. I am not optimistic.

Harry Potter and the Transformers

A two-fer deal here, since neither is very long....

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I haven't read any of the Harry Potter books. I've tried, and a friend gave me a paperback copy of the first, but it fails utterly to grab my interest. The first two films are snooze-worthy. While the first does a decent job of introducing everyone, the second isn't worth remembering. I didn't bother to see the third at the theatre because the second was so...dull.

That was a mistake. The Prisoner of Azkaban was superb and proved that the problem with the first two films was the director. The Goblet of Fire, the fourth film, continued the trend with yet another director, and now I'm completely hooked. Happily, The Order of the Phoenix, the fifth film, continues the trend. Mostly.

I qualify that because not a lot really happens. Indeed, in terms of the series as a whole, Order completes its task within the last half hour or so. Most everything else is just fluff. Thankfully, it's pleasant fluff and David Yates does a decent job of it, though he's no match for either Alfonso Cuarón (Prisoner) or Mike Newell (Goblet). Some little but key details get introduced, including the creation of Dumbledore's Army.

The film belongs firmly to Harry Potter which is good and bad. I've come to believe that Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Grainger are to the Potter universe what Kirk, McCoy, and Spock were to the original Star Trek, and the stories work at their best when the three work together. Here, Potter takes center stage and that leaves Ron and Hermione in the wings, gathering dust. Sad and hopefully corrected in the next film.

And having seen all this setup here, I'm ready for The Half-Blood Prince, also being directed by Yates. Alas, we must all wait until November 2008. And even longer for The Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final film.

Transformers

I hated these toys when they were big and famous. I loathed the TV show. It made my skin crawl when my young son played with these things, coddled in his desire by his mother and cruel grandparents (j/k). Transformers, more than meets the eye my left butt-cheek.

But this film.... Oh. My. God.

Shallow characters? Yes. Beyond simplistic plot? Yes. Ridiculous situations and dialogue? Yes. Doesn't matter, don't care, ate it up, loved it.

First there are the visuals. ILM goes beyond great here. You watch this film and you know that has to be a CGI special effects shot because cars just don't do things like that, like change into two-legged robots complete with cannons and rockets. Yet there is never a moment when the VFX fails and jolts you out of the film's reality. You just accept the fact that there are these enormous robots that can fold themselves into the shape of cars. You start to wonder how Michael Bay et al managed to get their hands on such super-secret military hardware.

Speaking of Michael Bay, he was either born to direct this film or was genetically engineered to do so. I'm not a huge fan of his work. The Rock, er, rocks, while Pearl Harbor, well, just sinks. Here, though, there's evidence that Steven Spielberg reined him in just enough to make it all work. Bay films have always portrayed the US military in a good light, and this film is no different. And it just all works because paper thin plot and all, everyone is working the problem and politics are completely tossed into the shredder.

The film bombards you with Moments. Just like that. Moments, with a capital "M". You see a lot of them in the various previews, clips, and trailers on the Internet. A stand-out occurs during the climatic firefight on a city street, where an Autobot (Transformer talk for "good guy") fires into the ground to launch himself into the air, up and over an innocent bystander, who gaps in ultra close-up horror as this multi-ton thing flies just over her hairdo and onto the other side while twisting in air, transforming an arm into another weapon to block and incoming round from a Decepticon (Transformer talk for "bad guy"), and while doing that returns fire all done in perfect slow motion, and I generally hate slow motion but not here.

The film does stunts like that all the time and gets away with it every time. Some have complained that the action is filmed too close-up, so that often the fights look like rolling heaps of trash cans lacking form or definition. I agree, to an extent. I think the intent was to film those moments from the point of view of the humans involved, and looked at that way it works perfectly.

That's my quibble for Transformers. The film flat-out rocks. No, it's not as good as Ratatouille (But really, what is?), but it's a very good summer action film that delights the eye and captures the imagination.

How did they know...?

I'm a Porsche 911!

You have a classic style, but you're up-to-date with the latest technology. You're ambitious, competitive, and you love to win. Performance, precision, and prestige - you're one of the elite,and you know it.

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

Talent, Lifer, Mandarin...?

I'm a Talent!

You're a risk-taker, and you follow your passions. You're determined to take on the world and succeed on your own terms. Whether in the arts, science, engineering, business, or politics, you fearlessly express your own vision of the world. You're not afraid of a fight, and you're not afraid to bet your future on your own abilities. If you find a job boring or stifling, you're already preparing your resume. You believe in doing what you love, and you're not willing to settle for an ordinary life.

Talent: 59%
Lifer: 31%
Mandarin: 41%

Take the Talent, Lifer, or Mandarin quiz.

Misery Business

Awesome, simply awesome....

New style of remake: Steal, no credit

Or at least, that's how it appears at the moment.

You have the latest Jodie Foster film, The Brave One, which looks an awful lot like an old Charles Bronson film, namely Death Wish.

The setup and premise is a virtual carbon copy: Loving couple broken apart when one spouse is brutally killed. In the case of The Brave One, they're out for a walk and get mugged; in the case of Death Wish, it's a home invasion robbery. Foster's character is unsatisfied with the "progress" being unmade in finding her husband's killer, so she goes on the hunt herself, popping bad guys while seeking The bad guy. Bronson was more straight-forward; he just starts striking back at muggers and the like and by accident -- or so it seemed -- he does eventually kill his wife's killers.

Death Wish was raked over the critical coals as providing provocation for vigilantes. Since The Brave One has a more A-list director (Neil Jordan), plus stars Foster, it will probably get better treatment.

The point here, though, is that I don't see any credit being given to Brian Garfield, who wrote the novel Death Wish, or Wendell Mayes, the screenwriter. And it's not as if the similarities aren't obvious.

I was going to name The Invasion as another example, but then I jumped to the IMDB entry and, voila, my worries were unfounded. Jack Finney and Invasion of the Body Snatchers get full and proper credit.

Still wondering about Foster's film, though.

iDon't Want One

As I've mentioned, Jeff Kirvin and I don't see eye to eye on politics, but when he's buzzing on technology, he's spot on more often than not. In The iPhone is a bad phone he writes:

Let’s look at this objectively. This is, at minimum, a $500 phone that has no tactile feedback for dialing, no voice dial, no smart dial (ie dialing 5478 to narrow your contacts to KIRV), no Bluetooth stereo headset support, no dial-up networking support for an attached computer, 2.5G data that is normally about 2-3 times dial-up modem speed, no video recording, no MMS for sending pictures, only takes pictures at 2MP and automatically resizes them to VGA for email (no way to override either of those sizes). The SIM card is removable and will work in other devices, but other SIMs will not work in this GSM world phone, so you’ll have to pay AT&T roaming charges to use this outside the US. Unlike every other phone available today, there is no free 14-day grace period and if you buy an iPhone today and return it tomorrow, you’ll have to eat a 10% ($50-60) restocking fee. The battery is not only not removable, and when it dies (after 300-400 full charges) you have to send it back, for a fee, to Apple and get it replaced, meaning you’ll be without your cell phone for Apple’s standard 3 business days. And as for talk time, Mobile Tech Review reports that an hour long call dropped the battery to 15%.

And in his follow-up, iPhone Hands-on, he goes on...

In many ways, the iPhone reminds me of the HTC Touch in reverse. While both devices sport finger-friendly and artistically gorgeous home screens, on the Touch you find yourself digging for the stylus and familiar Windows Mobile complexity once you get past the veneer. On the iPhone, by contrast, once you get past the beauty and style of the UI, you pretty much have nothing.

Like Jeff, I don't understand the insane desire for an iPhone that grips these people. Then again, I didn't understand the insane desire that gripped people when they had to have a Mac. It's a purely aesthetic appeal that appeals to me not.

There's little that the iPhone does that my 2+ year old Treo 650 can't do already, including suffering with AT&T EDGE connect speeds. This first generation iPhone is horribly crippled, yet the style conscious line right up. Remember the striper in Independence Day, as she looked up at the alien ship and cooed, "Pretty!" And then she and the rest got blasted.

The iPhone is a barely adequate phone and it doesn't do any of the things I assume a "smartphone" should do (e.g., create and edit Word and Excel documents). Thus, as my Treo begins to flake and I approach the end of my indentured servitude with AT&T, I look elsewhere, and the current gem in my eye is the Sprint Mogul. The Mogul is a true smartphone, does pretty much everything the iPhone does (albeit without the same grace and style; whoop), plus: accesses a true 3G network; edits/creates Word, Excel, and even OneNote files (once you install the OneNote app, included when you buy the desktop version); costs $100 less than the iPhone; and has a data plan that's a shade more expensive than the cheapest AT&T iPhone plan, but that includes unlimited text messages, unlimited data access, plus a slew of other features either not offered or unsupported on the iPhone.

All I "lose" is the 4GB/8GB internal memory, a problem that is cured, as far as I'm concerned, by the the MicroSD slot built into the Mogul, for effectively unlimited memory expansion.

Hmm, let me think. Cheaper, faster, more capable, better phone and data plan for about the same rate.... Tell me again how great the iPhone is(n't).

Jetsetters Pave, er, Save the Planet

Oh, I feel so relieved. For a moment there I almost thought that there was an issue with climate change, global warming, and catastrophic weather change. But given the number of "Live Earth" concerts that are going off, apparently all is well. I come to this conclusion by the simple logic that if things were really, really horrible, the concert participants -- good little stewards of the world that they are -- wouldn't be barfing so much carbon into the air as they go about lecturing the rest of us. With song.

I don't give a fig about "carbon offsets" and being "green". My lifestyle is more green than any of those involved in this fiasco; every Greenpeace test I take tells me so. That's irrelevant, however. The problem with carbon offsets is that they don't address what is purported to be the issue, i.e., pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That you can offset this by purchasing an indulgence from someone else misses the point. You're still dumping the stuff into the atmosphere, which the harpies say is bad, bad, bad, get it!?!

The Goreacle's home electrical bill is higher than the average American pays in a couple of years, yet he pleads "green" because he can pay someone else to assume the punishment for his carbon sins. Everyone involved in this entire Live Earth fiasco behaves the same way. They zoom about in their private jets, limos, buses, trucks, and cars (oh my) and scream, "Green!" because somewhere someone else is paying the price for their fun in the sun.

It's a corrupt system built for hypocrites. If the problem is that humans are dumping too many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the solution is to reduce the dump. This is what they scream. Hell, that will be the message on endless parade during the concert(s). The entire affair will involve a small circle of elitists lecturing us, the great unwashed, on how we should behave. We must reduce our carbon footprint so they can fly with Gulfstream pride.

These same saviors of the planet dismiss any suggestion about adaptation. If I take everything they say as true, then the change is upon us; the disaster has happened, we'd better get used to it. If Kyoto were fully implemented it might have an effect in 50+ years, and more likely wouldn't make a difference until 2100 (assuming Kyoto becomes the norm, rather than -- as currently written -- expiring in 2012). In the meanwhile...?

And I haven't even gotten into the hubris these righteous folk display in declaring that the weather they grew up with, that they enjoyed last week, is how it must be and ever shall remain.

For some strange reason, I grew up learning the notion that the weather changes, that the planetary climate is always in a state of change. I never expected that how it was when I was a lad was how it would be today. Somehow I remember all the lectures about the "little ice age" and solar variances and how the planet was sweltering hot at times in the past and frozen solid at others, and that our planet would continue to change until the day our sun swells up, cooks us, and dies of boredom. It was and is a given that we must adapt to the planet.

Now we have these enlightened souls who declare that we have altered the planet and that we have the power to alter it back. What a quaint notion. Never mind that the cost (both in terms of lives lost and money spent) for "correcting" the "problem" is greater than the cost (both in terms of lives lost and money spent) imposed by the "problem". And heaven forfend if we should discuss adaptation rather than offsets.

Meanwhile, their actions belie their words. Have a great concert, hypocrites!

UPDATE:

Courtesy of the Brits...

A Daily Mail investigation has revealed that far from saving the planet, the extravaganza will generate a huge fuel bill, acres of garbage, thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions, and a mileage total equal to the movement of an army.

The most conservative assessment of the flights being taken by its superstars is that they are flying an extraordinary 222,623.63 miles between them to get to the various concerts - nearly nine times the circumference of the world. The true environmental cost, as they transport their technicians, dancers and support staff, is likely to be far higher.

The total carbon footprint of the event, taking into account the artists' and spectators' travel to the concert, and the energy consumption on the day, is likely to be at least 31,500 tonnes of carbon emissions, according to John Buckley of Carbonfootprint.com, who specialises in such calculations.

Throw in the television audience and it comes to a staggering 74,500 tonnes. In comparison, the average Briton produces ten tonnes in a year.

Hey, hey, hey, their intentions are good. They just have an issue practicing what they preach is all.

(HT: Hot Air.)

The wonder of Ratatouille

I have this fantasy. I imagine the day when US animators start treating their art like their Japanese brethren, as a means of making film that isn't limited to a kid's audience. Consider Paprika, a very R-rated animated film, or Akira or the entire Ghost in the Shell series. The mind boggles at what might result if a talent such as Brad Bird, backed by a studio like Pixar, took on a more adult project, like Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light. (An interesting story of a cancelled film version may be found here.)

Until then, we have Ratatouille. It might be an over-statement to call Ratatouille the best film of the year, but not by much. Certainly if Beauty and the Beast can get such a nomination, this film can because it is far more deserving. Ratatouille raises the bar in so many ways it's amazing to consider that it is "merely" an animated film. Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles) rules animation the same way that light and air rule your life; there really is no substitute.

Plot-wise, this is not a complex or subtle film. It's message is plainly stated: "Not everyone can be an artist, but an artist can come from anywhere." From that simple premise, Bird weaves a story that is only predictable in the sense that it will have a happy ending. Beyond that it is always inventive and visually rich beyond words. There are lovely touches everywhere and while we expect high standards from a Pixar film, this production goes even higher. In so many ways it makes Pixar's past triumphs, even Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc., look like little more than paint-by-numbers.

For instance, there is a moment near the end of the film that is pure and visual, making a point without a word being spoken. Yes, it's cliché, but it is "told" with such exuberance and joy that cliché is tossed into the trash and you laugh out loud at what you're seeing. It's clear in that moment, and throughout the production and in his past works, that Brad Bird doesn't just enjoy making animated films, he loves them. He revels in animation in ways no one else in the industry does. Other Pixar animators obviously enjoy the craft, but there is so much love and grace and beauty and talent in Bird's films that all others are left at the starting gate.

Yeah, I'm that big of a fan.

Peter O'Toole has a promising new career as voice talent for animated films. His performance as Anton Ego, lethal food critic, is priceless. He's backed up by a marvelous character design and a series of deft touches: When viewed from the back, parts of Ego's typewriter form the shape of a leering skull; when looked at from above, his room is shaped like a coffin. On and on, each visual cue adding to the personality that O'Toole's voice is building.

In comparison, everyone else is merely great, and this includes Patton Oswalt (who?), Lou Romano, Brian Dennehy, and Ian Holm. No one slacks and no one's character is completely predictable. Each takes a subtle turn or change and each turn or change is perfectly keeping in character. It's a lovely ensemble, spoiled only by one: Janeane Garofalo.

Including her risked ruining the film because she is humorless and vacuous in spectacular ways. Luckily for us, the film is saved by her putting on so thick a French accent that she's unrecognizable.

But back to the good stuff: Ratatouille is fantastic. It completely redeems Pixar for making Cars. (Of course, the included teaser for 2008's Wall-E fills me with dread. The teaser is so lacking spark, energy, or life that I cringed.) And Brad Bird is a national treasure. I loved the little credit at the end, declaring that the film is 100% animated, no motion capture used. Ladies and gentlemen, that is love and devotion to a cinematic art.

C'mon, Brad, Lord of Light calls.