The Infamous Brad

Quick Movie Note: Dragon Tattoo

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 08:56:09 GMT

I don't have a lot to say about it. And maybe I'm not qualified to have an opinion, as someone who didn't see the Swedish film version and who deliberately held off on reading the book until after I'd seen the movie. But The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is tanking at the box office, and, in my opinion, it doesn't deserve to, so I thought I'd stick a quick endorsement of it into my blog.

As I mentioned a few weeks or so ago, the parallels between volume 1 of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy and the earliest days of the real life Team Palast as documented in Palast's latest book are kind of eerie: an elderly womanizing disgraced liberal investigative journalist teams up with a younger man-hating female victim of sexual abuse amateur detective to take down rich killers who are above the law. The Hollywood trade press is saying that one reason it's tanking at the box office is that this is not exactly what most Americans want to go see during Christmas week, but it's the kind of thing that's solidly in my wheel-house.

It's a beautiful film. The Trent Reznor soundtrack is a little bombastic, in that way that Jerry Goldsmith scores usually are -- when the film wants you to be scared or wants you to be sad, the sound track hammers the stuffing out of you about it -- but it's an excellent soundtrack. (I walked out humming Enya's "Orinocco Flow" and twitching from the deliberately jarring way it's used.) Most of the violence happens off screen or is filmed at discrete angles, and the deliberately sickening attack on Lisbeth that's so important to the plot is still made only just barely as horrific as it needs to be; this is a profoundly unexploitative film about a subject that's easy and tempting for Hollywood to exploit. I'm told that the book and first movie adaptation play up the whodunnit aspects of the plot; this is, instead, a movie that's less about the cerebral exercise of solving a series of crimes than it is about the emotional and physical cost of doing so. I've heard complaints that Larsson's politics didn't make it into the film, but I don't know -- given the limitations of the movie's length, I think there are plenty of allusions to the central political issue of the book, at least as far as I know it from the many reviews I read, namely what Sweden's hushed-up, it's-impolite-to-bring-up, history of Nazi collaboration means for a country that wants to be an economically successful Scandanavian social welfare state, about the parallels between fascism then and neo-liberal corporatocracy now.

But above all, it's hands-down the best acted film I've seen all year. Maybe that's a low hurdle; I haven't seen a lot of movies this year, and most of them were genre films. But even with that grain of salt, let me tell you that Craig may be wasted on this part: his character is not an emotionally demonstrative man and neither is Craig in this role, and it's not hard to play a nearly one-note character, but I think he's more than adequate. Mara, on the other hand, is amazing; this is an Oscar-bait performance. There's this thing she does with her shifting posture that just completely, in every scene, sells the fact that this is a badly broken person, someone who has been hurt way too often, someone who toughs it out over a lot of unhealed emotional scars -- you constantly see her trying to do the impossible, to constantly watch every angle around her while lost in her own thoughts and while trying not to look anybody in the eye, someone trying to simultaneously be ignored and be too scary to mess with. The supporting cast are all pretty amazing, too.

I had one big complaint with the movie, and I know from the reviews of the book and the other movie that it's a source material problem. It's only a minor spoiler, since there are several characters in the movie that this description fits, but ... really? A Russian mafiosi alcoholic Nazi Christian fundamentalist corrupt corporate executive rapist serial killer? Really? Isn't that, oh, I don't know, just a little over the top? Just a little cartoonish?

Still: this movie deserves, in my opinion, to sell enough tickets to get the other two volumes of the trilogy green-lit. Please, go see it in a theater.

Review: In Time (movie) (contains spoilers)

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 05:39:39 GMT

There's something vaguely ironic about my having waited to the last minute to see the movie I was most looking forward to this year, given that the movie's title is In Time. (If you go back and look at my beginning-of-the-year list of movies I was looking forward to, this one was referred to by its working title, Now.) Being an old-fashioned sci-fi buff, I'm frequently prone to complaining that "they just don't make 'em like they used to," and by that I mean good old-fashioned low-budget '70s social-commentary hard-SF or semi-hard-SF dystopias. A couple of years ago, we got Duncan Jones' tribute to Silent Running, Moon; this year, we get Andrew Niccol's tribute to Soylent Green, In Time, starring a not-over-extended-by-the-part Justin Timberlake as the hero, and completely charming Amanda Seyfield as ... well, let me lj-cut the rest of this, because the trailer only does it partial justice, but I can't explain more without wandering deep into spoiler territory.

The premise of In Time is that some time in the near future, the whole human race gets genetically engineered for immortality. Humans are born with a count-down timeclock on one forearm, reading 1 year, 0 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0 seconds. It doesn't budge until age 25, at which time two things happen: you stop growing older, and the clock starts counting down in real time. One year from now, a programmed-in suicide will knock you dead; from the way everybody grabs their chest when it goes off, I'm guessing it implodes the heart. But if you can earn time, you can extend that indefinitely. If you can afford the health care, and you avoid violent death or accidental death, you can live forever. You earn time the way we earn money; a central mint issues time, jobs pay in time, people spend time to buy necessities and luxuries.

Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) was raised by his single mother; his dad, who used to be an illegal prizefighter, was (he finds out) assassinated for giving away his substantial winnings to the poor. You see, here's how they solve the overcrowding problem: each zone has a rated maximum population. Whenever the population rises above that, wages are cut and prices are raised until the poorest people in the zone, the least productive, "zero out," they run out of time. And as the child of a single parent who took out ruinous pay-day loans to raise him, and who had to beg her son for time as soon as his clock started up, Will has never yet, in the three years since he turned 25, had more than 24 hours on his arm. Until one night he meets a suicidal financial services executive who has been giving away his time all day, who is down to his last 116 years on his arm, and Will saves that guy from an organized crime gang. It turns out that guy wanted to find a gang like that and have them steal all his time; he's 105, he's tired of living, and (as I read his motivation), like the rich guy whose death kicked off the movie Soylent Green, his conscience is killing him. So after Will saves him, the rich guy gets Will drunk, and gives him all of his remaining time, leaving him a note: "Don't waste my time."

The Timekeepers think Will stole that time. And they're even more worried when they find out that Will, like his father, is giving that time away to poor people; the population control function of high inflation can't work if the poorest aren't allowed to die off. If (as is said repeatedly in the movie) anybody is to live forever, many must die, but not all of them at once. And the last horrifying realization is that the central bankers, who restrict trade and travel across population zones so that they can control wages and inflation on a neighborhood by neighborhood level, have a secret: blackmailing people to be productive has worked too well. The earth could sustain a much higher population than it does; technology doesn't have to have fallen back to 1970s levels. They just keep it that way because they like having things the way they are, with them living like immortal god kings off of the production of a vast wage-slave class. (As with nearly all dystopian SF, there is no visible middle class in In Time. I can't even make up my mind if one was implied by the map on the wall.)

As he infiltrates the rich-people's neighborhood, Will meets a girl his own age, the only-child daughter of the central banker for the city he lives in, Silvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried). She's the first to spot that however much time he has on his arm, he's from the ghetto: he does everything just a little too fast, as if he were still in a hurry. And she has always desperately wanted to meet someone from the ghetto, because she hates being rich. The rich have too much to lose, so they take no chances at anything, and she's dying of boredom. So she doesn't object at all when Will, ambushed by the Timekeepers at a party at her house, takes her hostage; she joins forces with him, the (if anything) bloodthirstier half of the partnership, trying desperately to rob her father of enough time to keep themselves alive, to keep Will's friends in the ghetto alive, and ideally to destroy the big-time bankers.

The movie makes very good use of the countdown-clock storytelling device. Characters we care about are constantly running almost out of time, either from sudden surprise expenses or dangerous gambles or outright robbery, and the system really is rigged to make it "impossible" for them to get more time before they zero out. Even (more or less) knowing the ending, I kept finding myself leaning forward in my seat, watching people's arms count down their last few seconds, wondering how in the hell they were going to save themselves this time, and really caring. It's a great trick, one I haven't seen this well done since the first act of Spielberg's remake of Always.

Timberlake's no genius actor, but the nearly one note performance he's asked for in here is entirely within his range; he really sells the idea that this is a man who is would grieve his many dead loved ones if he could spare the time, a man who ought to be crippled by survivor guilt like so many of his neighbors are (there are a lot of good minor-character performances in this), and would be, if it weren't for one thing: he just can not make himself give up. And Seyfried nails the rich goth-wanna-be thrill seeker role, the rapid mood swings that come from finally getting what she wants and being completely unprepared for the reality, of someone who knows that she has no business falling in love with her kidnapper but realizes that no, it's not Stockholm Syndrome and no it's not just his cause (which is more her cause, for most of the movie, than his, because he just hasn't thought that far ahead) and no she's not just using him -- this "not giving up" thing is pretty hot.

The movie's not for everyone. You really do have to just accept the flaky premise at face value, the way you treat faster than light travel in space opera, and not set out to try to poke holes in it; if you can't accept it as a storytelling device, you will hate this movie, as quite a few reviewers did. And the ending feels out of place, like it was bolted on from another script at the last minute; if somebody digs up an article to show me that they test-screened a version with a different ending, that audiences hated it, and that the studio made them reshoot a more optimistic ending, I will not be at all surprised. But it was every bit the movie I was hoping for, and more.

Sucker Punch: Did the critics see the same movie I did?

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 10:09:37 GMT

Now that the midnight showings are over, the newspaper reviews of Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch are up on the web. And I'm left asking myself ... did the critics see the same movie I did? See, I walked out of it slightly unhappy, but about the opposite of the thing that all the critics are complaining about. The critics are all calling it "incoherent," which is absolute bullcrap. On the contrary, I walked out of it thinking that Zack Synder has no faith in his audience, that every plot point was hammered home so bluntly and blatantly, including repeated zoom-ins and near freeze-frame camera work on every important image, because he was afraid people would say the same thing about this that they said about two other psychological horror films of which I'm fond, Angel Heart and Jacob's Ladder, what the whole audience was saying (except for me) after I walked out of those films: "did you understand any of that?" and "what did we just see?"

But no, apparently, if your narrative has any complexity to it, you cannot make it so obvious that an American audience, even one made up of allegedly expert film critics, can't miss it. So let me outline the main plot of Sucker Punch (but only the main plot, and not any of the conclusions or outcomes, these are the least spoilers I can give, and nearly all of them are telegraphed in the trailer, but I apologize in advance).

Reality: "Baby Doll" is a teenage girl in 1957 whose wealthy mother has died and disinherited her husband, Baby Doll's stepfather; in a rage, he gets drunk and tries to rape both of his step-daughters; the older girl, our lead, tries to shoot him to stop him and accidentally shoots her sister instead. So to ensure that he gets to keep the money and to shut her up he has her committed to an insane asylum ... where he then bribes a corrupt orderly to forge the paperwork necessary to get her lobotomized in 5 days, so she can't tell anyone what she knows. But on her way in, she is already planning her escape. The camera shows us, then reverses to a close-up on her face, then reverses again to a close-up on (so we can't possibly miss them) the following four things: a map of the whole facility with all exits labeled, hanging at the nurses' station; a fat orderly leaning against a sign that says "in the event of fire, all exits will unlock" while playing with a cigarette lighter; a chef chopping onions with a huge pointy knife; and the clearly-labeled master key hanging around the corrupt orderly's neck. Since she's drugged up, her stepfather and the orderly discuss their plot to have her lobotomized, openly, in front of her. She retreats into a fantasy world ...
- Outer Fantasy Layer:... where instead of in an insane asylum, she's in a mafia-run brothel where she and the other girls are made to dance for the customers; she is told she is being reserved for a wealthy man who's paid to rape her, for her virginity. She is also told that if she refuses to dance, between now and then, she will be killed. So to put herself in the mood to dance, her fantasy self retreats into a fantasy world where ...
  - Inner Fantasy Layer: ... she encounters her first of several ridiculously over-the-top animé-style fantasy worlds in which she is a fantasy warrior, adept with sword and pistol and martial arts, advised by a wise old sensei to seek out "a map, a source of fire, a knife, a key, and a mystery that only you can find." When that fantasy ends, she blinks, and she is back in the outer fantasy layer where ...
- Outer Fantasy Layer: When she retreats into her inner-layer fantasy worlds, without her being aware of what she's doing, she turns into a hypnotically erotic dancer ... providing cover for her co-conspirators to help her find the elements of their quest (still in the outer fantasy layer). So she must repeatedly dance, and each time she does, she retreats into yet more ...
  - Inner Fantasy Layers: a series of worlds where she, and the prostitutes who've agreed to escape with her, are transformed, in Baby Doll's imagination, into a crack covert-operations team, each with their own choice of blatantly anachronistic weapons and style of combat, pursuing (symbolically) each quest element. At the end of each quest, Baby Doll blinks again to return to ...
- Outer Fantasy Layer: the mafia-controlled brothel to find out whether or not, while she was dancing, her co-conspirators have successfully completed the next phase of their escape plan.

The transitions are clearly labeled. It will not astonish you in the least, I think, to hear that at the end of the mafia-brothel storyline, there is a pullback to the actual-reality storyline, and I will not spoil for you the ending of that storyline (although frankly, it's telegraphed early and hard). If you feel Sucker Punched by the ending of that storyline, I can only assume that (a) you were somehow as confused by the story as the critics were, and yet (b) you still cared -- a combination I find unimaginable.

Personally, I loved it. Zack Snyder said, in an interview that was published yesterday morning, that he followed one rule when editing the inner fantasy layer segments: "The Rule of Awesome" -- if he could think of a way to cram more "awesome" into each sequence, he did so. I can't imagine how in the world anybody who can't enjoy a series of mini-movies about an anachronistic manga-style all-girl covert-ops squad dueling giant demon samurai in ancient Japan, then slaughtering steampunk Prussian zombies in the trenches of a ruined Paris of an alternate-universe 1917, then (with help of a Stratofortress!) battling orcs guarding the castle of a dragon in a fantasy-universe World War II, then fighting murderous androids in the narrow confines of a maglev monorail heading for a retro-sci-fi colony on a moon of Jupiter ... if you can't enjoy those things, each shot crammed with as much action and excitement and over-the-top art and insane fight choreography as Zack Snyder knows how to make, how did you end up at this movie? I can't predict whether you'll enjoy the outer fantasy layer, but I did. I can't predict how you'll enjoy (or even tolerate) the 1957-reality storyline, although it worked for me.

But if you found it incoherent? Either you were paying less than no attention, or I just don't get how you missed it.

Movies I Do and Don't Care About, 2011

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 01:56:58 GMT

io9.com has up their list of the 55 science fiction and fantasy movies that are projected to be released in 2011. I just went through it, and (as with most previous years) there are ones I'm dying to see, ones I'm willing to see, ones I'm waiting for more info about, and ones I couldn't be dragged to at gunpoint. A few personal opinions:

March 25th: Sucker Punch. ToplessRobot.com calls this "Things the Internet Likes: The Movie." You couldn't keep me away from this one at gunpoint. I will be pleasantly surprised if I don't have to turn my brain off for it, but even if I do have to, it'll be fun to watch.

April 1st: Source Code. If this one weren't by Duncan Jones, the guy who made Moon, I'd be really dubious. But with his name on the project, I'm mightily tempted.

April 8th: Your Highness. Natalie Portman as a damsel in distress who doesn't need rescuing? Yeah, I think I'm interested in this one.

May 20th: PotC4: On Stranger Tides. The only reason I'm even minimally tempted by this is that it's based loosely on Tim Powers' book On Stranger Tides, which I remember enjoying. On the other hand, it is not just any sequel, but the 4th in a franchise. And the truth be told, while I enjoyed the book, it didn't make all that strong of an impression on me. This may well be a "wait for the DVD" thing for me.

June 17th: The Green Lantern. This is the only superhero movie of 2011 I'm even vaguely tempted by, purely on the strength of the amazing trailers for it. (Yes, I said "only." You couldn't drag me to either of the Avengers prequels, nor the X-Men prequel, not for love nor money, and the trailer for The Green Hornet looks perfectly awful.)

July 29th: Cowboys and Aliens. Sort of the mathematical opposite of the previous entry: I started out interested, but every trailer, photo, or film clip I see makes it look even worse. Unless it gets consistently amazing reviews, I'm leaning more and more towards skipping it.

August 5th: The Darkest Hour. The premise has been done, overdone, and done to death lately. The only reason I'm even vaguely tempted is that it's by Timur Bekmambetov, and I loved Night Watch and 9. Leaning towards seeing it.

September 30th: Now. Sounds heavy-handed, but io9, which has seen most of the script, describes it as remarkably well written, and the theme is timely. (Pun unintended.) Tempted, but I'm going to wait for reviews.

October 14th: The Thing (prequel). I see no plausible way to improve on the John Carpenter/Rick Baker original, no plausible reason to make this movie at all. But I'm told that the people making it are huge John Carpenter fans, so I'm cautiously and tentatively willing to consider going to this one. Maybe.

December 16th: Sherlock Holmes 2. I don't care how amazing the first one was, it wasn't good enough to get me to break my rule of thumb against paying movie theater prices, not even matinee prices, to go see a sequel. Maybe if somebody else drags me to it at their own expense; otherwise, it'll wait for DVD.

What the Current Millionaire Tax Cut "Debate" Reminds Me Of

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 17:37:56 GMT

Johnny Rocco: There's only one Johnny Rocco.
James Temple: How do you account for it?
Frank McCloud: He knows what he wants. Don't you, Rocco?
Johnny Rocco: Sure.
James Temple: What's that?
Frank McCloud: Tell him, Rocco.
Johnny Rocco: Well, I want uh ...
Frank McCloud: He wants more, don't you, Rocco?
Johnny Rocco: Yeah. That's it. More. That's right! I want more!
James Temple: Will you ever get enough?
Frank McCloud: Will you, Rocco?
Johnny Rocco: Well, I never have. No, I guess I won't.

(Edward G. Robinson as Johnny Rocco, Humphrey Bogart as Frank McCloud, and Lionel Barrymore as James Temple, from one of my favorite movies of all time, Key Largo)

Doing a "Modesty Blaise"

Tue, 18 May 2010 21:27:18 GMT

One of my news feeds threw me a link to something I wouldn't normally have read on my own. It's an article on Entertainment Weekly's website, ew.com, about the time that the Fletch remake, or relaunch, or sequel, or prequel has spent in "development hell." The article's called "The Curse of 'Fletch,'" by Clark Collis, but what really pulled me in was the alternate headline that the NYT's "Idea of the Day" blog gave it, "It's News When Some Movies Don't Get Remade."

It's an entertaining enough article on its own terms, but I'm especially glad I read it, for one paragraph that has almost nothing to do with the subject of the article:

''The updates I would get were that they were going to do what they call a 'Modesty Blaise,''' [Kevin Smith] says. The term refers to the straight-to-video 2004 Miramax movie My Name Is Modesty. The Weinsteins had bought the rights to the character of Modesty Blaise, a female adventurer who originally appeared in a British newspaper comic strip, for Miramax golden boy Quentin Tarantino, a huge fan of the fictional heroine. (In Pulp Fiction, John Travolta is holding a Modesty Blaise book when he is killed by Bruce Willis.) Tarantino never got around to doing anything with the project, so Miramax produced My Name Is Modesty to ensure the property stayed with the company.

I got chills.

I'm not the world's biggest Modesty Blaise fan: I only have about 5 or 6 of the books. But like every Modesty Blaise fan, I've spent years wishing someone would film this character. Modesty is a woman who spent the first couple of decades of her life building up her own personal highly-successful organized-crime ring, specializing in art and jewelry theft; then she got into a personal fight with a drug smuggling gang that turned bloody. She disbanded the gang and got out of the crime business altogether; the only member she still stays in contact with is her best friend Willy Garvin. She's wealthy enough that she never needs to work again, and she and Willy are deadly enough that they don't really have any enemies left from the old days. And she's bored. So she travels around the world, hiking into or parachuting into the most dangerous places in the world, just to hang out and get to know people. Sometimes, when it amuses her, or when the enemies are particularly loathsome, she does jobs for British intelligence that are too hard for the James Bonds of the world to tackle, especially if they involve chances to kill drug gang lords or rape gang leaders.

I have no idea what Quentin Tarantino would do with that character. Nor do I have even the slightest idea where you could find an actress who was comfortable playing an action hero who is so relentlessly bipolar; Modesty changes gears from languidly sensuous and playfully ironic to cold and deadly professional and back at the flip of a switch. The odds of a Modesty Blaise movie being any less of a train wreck than My Name is Modesty are awfully low. As much as I would desperately love to see a good treatment of it brought to the screen, it has always struck me as borderline unfilmable, as too good for Hollywood. On the other hand, I thought that Sin City and Watchmen were unfilmable, too, and if I'd read L.A. Confidential before I'd seen it, I would have declared it unfilmable, too. So the thought that some years ago, some studio came close to giving a serious director a chance to tackle the project? It gives me chills.

Duncan Jones, "Moon"

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 05:35:58 GMT

As the list of announced movies coming out in 2009 was being finalized, an awful lot of you were truly excited about three of them. So was I. But probably not the same three. Lots of you were excited about the Abrams' relaunch of Star Trek, the Transformers sequel, and the 6th Harry Potter movie. One of those I wouldn't cross the street to see if it was completely free, and the other two you couldn't pay me any sum of money to voluntarily sit through. (I am just that thoroughly done with remakes, sequels, and franchises.) No, the three movies I was the most excited about, breathless for them to open, were Dreamworks' "Monsters versus Aliens," Duncan Jones' "Moon," and Peter Jackson's "District 9." Well, I finally got to see Monsters versus Aliens at the local dollar theater last weekend, and it was even funnier than I'd hoped it would be. District 9 doesn't come out until next month. But Moon finally made it to the Plaza Frontenac theater in St. Louis last night, and even without seeing District 9, I'm pretty sure I've seen the best science fiction movie of 2009. And I'll tell you why: I think I've seen the best science fiction movie of the last ten years. Maybe the last thirty years.

It's the mid 21st century, and most of Earth's problems have been solved, directly or indirectly, by one company: Lunar Industries, Incorporated. They maintain a base on the far side of the moon where automated machinery scrapes the lunar soil for Helium-3. When they fill a Helium-3 fuel tank, it gets shipped back to Earth via magnetic catapult, where it powers the fusion reactors that provide 70% of the world's energy supply in an entirely safe, clean, and renewable way, providing the power to irrigate deserts for farmland, providing the power for nearly all of the world's transportation and industry. Of course, somebody has to man the base, to repair anything that breaks down, to transport full tanks of He-3 from the mining rovers to the launch vehicles, and so forth. And transporting people back and forth is expensive and slow. So Lunar Industries hires one guy at a time to work a three year hitch at their lunar base, with no company but GERTY (brilliantly voiced by Kevin Spacey), the emoticon-faced artificial intelligence assigned to care for him and keep him safe. When his three year shift is over, he shuts the base down temporarily, seals himself into a cryogenic capsule that gets loaded onto the slow space ship home, they send up another guy in the return capsule, and mining continues.

Actor Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, who is just two weeks shy of getting to go home. It's been a rough three year shift, because while he was still in transit from Earth, a solar storm knocked out the satellite that was supposed to relay signals around the curve of the moon; the only way he's had to communicate with his bosses, let alone with his wife and daughter back home, has been via recorded messages, relayed via a research station in orbit around Jupiter whenever they can spare the bandwidth for him. So he's been feeling extra isolated, and it's driving him just a little bit crazy. That's making him just a little bit sloppy in his work, which causes an accident ... one that reveals that there are several lies embedded in what I've told you so far. He's in a lot of trouble. (Warning: Trailer contains significant spoilers.)

Sony Pictures Classics hasn't been doing much to publicize this little $5 million movie; I've only seen one trailer for it, and no advertising at all, not even in front of other science fiction movies where it would have made sense for them to advertise. A few aging journalists paid it a little bit of attention because there was one trivia news "hook" that caught their eye: director Duncan Jones is David Bowie's son, who literally grew up on the set of "Labyrinth." But when I caught the New York Times' interview with Jones about his then-upcoming movie, the David Bowie link was the least interesting part, to me. What really caught my eye was that Jones didn't credit his father's work as the inspiration, but (in order mentioned in the article): "Alien," "Outland," "Silent Running," and "Blade Runner." That was enough for me: anybody in movie-making today who remembers the truly great science fiction movies, and even the mediocre ones, that came out during what seems to me, in retrospect, like the golden age of science fiction film between Kubrick's pretty but over-rated "2001" and Lucas's movie that ruined science fiction film forever ("Star Wars," of course) instantly gets my attention. Especially Silent Running, which I still consider one of the five best science fiction movies ever made. And this movie genuinely deserves to be mentioned in the same breath, as well as in the same breath as other greats from the same time period like "Escape from the Planet of the Apes," "Westworld," and "Soylent Green."

If, like me, you look at today's science fiction movies (and even much of the TV), where a gazillion-dollar special effects budget and a soundtrack full of explosions, plus gratuitous chase scenes, boob shots, and toy tie-ins, substitutes for any attention to acting, writing, pacing, plot, science, technology, or (gods forbid) thought, and think, "Wow, they just don't make them like they used to," you absolutely must track this movie down and see it, see it in a theater on the big screen, see it even if you have to travel to do so. It's absolutely worth it.

CoH Has Cool Customer Service People

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:55:45 GMT

Allow me to present an excerpt from the official City of Heroes forums, in a thread about the first rumor to leak out of Comic Con about upcoming features. Dramatis personae: Castle, developer in charge of superpowers. Koschej, a forum moderator. Texas_Justice, player character superhero. InfamousBrad, player character supervillain (moi). Not seen: Back Alley Brawler (BAB), animator; pohsyb, systems programmer; Lighthouse, senior forum moderator.

Texas_Justice, 7/24/08 9:56 pm: "Maybe as a temporary solution ask one of the following, politely of course, to please comment in the thread to get it into the Dev Digest so it can be seen. Castle, BAB, pohsyb, ..."

Castle, 7/24/08 10:13 pm: "As you wish!"

InfamousBrad, 7/25/08 03:38 am: "And then, one day, Texas_Justice realized that when Castle was saying, 'As you wish,' what he really meant was, 'I love you.' ..."

Koschej, 7/25/08 03:43 am:

Koschej: I promise I will not mod you until you reach the end of the thread.
InfamousBrad: That's VERY comforting, but I'm afraid you'll just have to wait.
Koschej: I hate waiting. I could give you my word as a Moderator.
InfamousBrad: No good. I've known too many Moderators.
Koschej: Isn't there any way you trust me?
InfamousBrad: Nothing comes to mind.
Koschej: I swear on the soul of my manager, Lightingo Housetoya, you will reach the end unmodded.
InfamousBrad: Throw me the scroll bar.

Ok, back on topic now please.

Criticizing a Movie Other than the One on the Screen: WALL-E

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:03:30 GMT

I've been waffling back and forth on whether or not to write this column ever since I saw WALL-E two weeks ago. That here it is, two weeks later, and I'm still hearing a specific criticism leveled at the movie that is just plain factually wrong, that two weeks later some people are deeply angry at this movie for something that isn't actually on the screen and I keep running into this people, has tipped me off of the fence on this one. This journal entry is aimed at people who (a) haven't seen the movie yet, and (b) have read multiple reviews of it, and (c) are, based on the reviews, so angry that they're not going to see the movie. It may also be of some interest to some of you who did see the movie, completely misunderstood what you saw, and are angry at a movie only exists in your head, that isn't the movie that was up on the screen.

For what it's worth, this isn't the first time I've seen this problem. The main reason that one of my all-time favorite movies, Pleasantville, didn't make more money than it did is that they all showed up expecting one movie (a movie adaptation of "Hi, Honey, I'm Home!"), saw another (a morally complex metaphor about whether or not we'd be better off with more innocence or if we're better off with "the knowledge of good and evil," and what if we could choose?), and didn't switch gears fast enough. The same thing happened to me with 300; I went expecting one movie (a Hollywood-ized super-hero version of the battle of Thermopylae), saw another (a live action version of Heavy Metal), and almost didn't switch gears fast enough to enjoy it. Although I haven't gotten out to see it yet, I gather that the same problem has happened to most critics and audiences who saw Hancock. They showed up expecting a comic romp about a drunken bum with super powers, had it turn into an elaborate metaphysical debate over which you'd choose, to have the power to help thousands of people, or to be happy, if you had to choose, and didn't switch gears fast enough, either. And so it is with WALL-E, because nearly every hostile review of WALL-E I've read says the same thing. They all loved the first one third of the movie, but they all complain that there's a major plot twist after that that ruins the whole movie for them. Some of them have gotten quite angry about it. And just as with Pleasantville, 300, and Hancock, I insist that what they're objecting to is a movie that they imagined, that they projected their own neuroses onto, not the one that Pixar made and is showing.

Those of you who've read the hostile reviews, tracked down the spoiler sites, or seen the movie and gotten angry at it, you all know what happens at the 1/3rd point in the movie. WALL-E and EVE travel to the Axiom, a space-going "ark" containing the descendants of the wealthiest survivors of the ecological collapse on Earth; now that EVE has returned with proof that life without life support is possible on the surface of the Earth again, it's time for the human race to begin coming home. And what everybody who gets angry at this movie (except for a few far right-wing nutcases) gets angry about is what we find on board the Axiom, what the human race has become. After 700 years of having their every need tended to by robots, of eating all of their "food" through straws, and of never moving anywhere except via hover-chair (and where each generation comes from if nobody can move out of their chairs, we're not told, unless the robots handle that for them, too), all of the surviving members of the human race have become seriously, seriously fat.

And that's what drove untold thousands of people psycho: the portrayal of all Americans (because whether or not there are other space arks, we are shown that everybody on the Axiom is descended from Americans) as so morbidly obese that they're helpless. Because as everybody knows, human beings only come in one of two shapes: fat, or virtuous. Everybody knows that since everybody around you wants you not to be fat, and since everybody (mistakenly) "knows" that "all" it would take for you not to be fat is to exert minimal self-control and go to some minimal effort to please other people, that means that if you are fat, then you must have no regard for anybody else. And if you have no regard for anybody else, and don't care what other people think of you or want from you, then you obviously must not have any virtues at all. Right? And the fat-acceptance activists, who think that the movie they think they saw or that they heard about without seeing perpetuates these beliefs and mocks the lazy fat people to their faces on the screen, are just as histrionically angry at Pixar as the rest of the country is over the implication that 700 years from now, there won't be even one single American left in the whole human race who cares enough about other people to bother to be skinny.

If that's the movie you're afraid you're going to see if you go? Ignore the rest of this review and go see it, on my word, and if you still think so, come back and read the rest.

If that's the movie you think you saw? You weren't paying attention. It's not just my imagination; there were other critics (I saw at least a couple over at Pandagon) who spotted something that the directors did very, very deliberately, and did at least three times: they very carefully intercut scenes of the adults on the Axiom with scenes of babies in swaddling clothes. Further, when the ceremonial captain of the Axiom has to stand up and walk to save his passengers from a robotic mutiny, his gait is very obviously modeled on any baby's first steps. Knowing that, go back and look at the passengers on the Axiom, and its captain. No double chins. No belly-fat doubled over and overlapping their waists. No skin problems. Completely spherical heads. Almost completely spherical hands and feet with tiny little fingers that don't meet. The message of that part of WALL-E is not "capitalism will make you ugly and lazy and fat." Heck, watch the passengers; they do everything that the ubiquitous robots will let them do, and then complain that there isn't more for them to do. No, the message of that part of WALL-E is that having other people do everything for you, having them cheerfully and immediately cater to your every need, is not corrupting, it's infantalizing. And life, real human life, began for you the first time you rejected help and did something yourself.

You don't even have to project any kind of moral flaw onto the passengers of the Axiom to explain why it came to this. Remember that at least as far as their ancestors know, they may well be the last survivors of the human species, and they're on a lifeboat. Damned straight they did everything they were told by the machines. That's just basic lifeboat survival 101: obey the chain of command, hope that the person in charge knows what orders to give. If you think otherwise, you need to read more case studies of people surviving under lifeboat conditions: the minute everybody starts figuring out for themselves what to do, they start working at cross purposes, and unless help arrives really, really fast, they all die. So when Auto Pilot decided, and instructed everybody through the Steward bots, that it would be safer for the human race if they let the robots do all the work, do everything, since the robots don't make mistakes and endanger the species? Heck yes they obeyed. They come by their seven hundred years of neoteny through no vice, through no lack of virtue, but entirely honestly. They are not to be blamed for having let themselves be infantalized, they are to be praised for recognizing, even when their robotic "parents" didn't, that WALL-E and EVE had brought them proof that it was time for them to begin to grow up.

Sunshine: Wow, I Thought They Stopped Making 'Em Like That

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 07:20:16 GMT

I feel bad reviewing Sunshine this late; if the movie schedules in your home town are anything like the ones here, the odds are that I'm posting this pretty much too late for any of you to benefit from it. I think that tonight, Thursday night, is probably the last night that it's showing on the big screen here in St. Louis.

I had the hardest time getting anybody interested in seeing Sunshine with me because, well, basically because nobody had heard of it. Boy am I glad that I finally did, though. It is not the feel-good hit of the summer (to put it mildly). It's not in the top 5 science fiction movies of all time; maybe not even in the top 50. But I enjoyed it tremendously, and would have if even for only one reason: as I said in the subject, this is the kind of good old fashioned hard science fiction space thriller that I thought they'd stopped making for good. Sunshine feels, in a lot of ways, like the movie that Arthur Clarke wanted to make before it got arted up beyond comprehensibility by Kubrick. I also sense that it owes a lot to one of my all time favorite movies, the undeservedly obscure Douglas Trumble movie with Bruce Dern, Silent Running. It feels like a really good short story from Analog, from back in the good old days when Campbell or Schmidt were editing it, made into an incredibly faithful movie adaptation.

The science behind it is that we know that all stars are, to some extent, variable stars, and it's hard to know just how variable our own star is. In Sunshine, some time in the uncomfortably near future the sun has gone into a sudden "solar minimum" cycle, dimmed enough to bring on a global ice age. Billions are freezing and starving. But one physicist has an almost mad-scientist level plan: combine the force of all the world's nuclear bombs into one gigantic fusion bomb, shield it so that it can survive a fall through the outer levels of the solar photosphere, and detonate it as close to the center of the sun as possible, in hopes of igniting a more powerful fusion reaction and jump-starting the end of the solar minimum. The result was an immense spaceship, the Icarus: one nuclear fusion bomb "the size of Manhattan" and a long, narrow crew quarters module, all hiding behind an immense gold-plated solar shield. It took years to build, then 18 months to fly from Earth to the sun ... and nothing happened. The radiation that close to the sun is too strong to hear the Icarus's communications through, so we don't know why, and the Icarus never returned. So in total desperation, the planet's governments scavenged the last remains of technological civilization, almost, and mined all the last known accessible deposits of uranium, and spent another five and a half years building the last chance we have, the Icarus 2. We are told early on that the starvation has gotten so bad, and the resources were so mined out, that if the Icarus 2 doesn't make it, or if it does make it and the bomb fails to turn up the brightness on the sun, civilization is doomed, and maybe even the whole human race itself.

The Icarus spaceship in this movie is a thing of beauty, the way the Discovery was in 2001 or the Valley Forge in Silent Running, even more so than the Serenity in Firefly. A big chunk of that beauty comes from the physics involved: a total contrast between light so intense it's deadly on one side of the solar shield, total darkness lit only by the running lights of the ship in its shadow. Other than Michelle Yeoh (as the ship's environmental officer), the cast are nearly all total unknowns, but there isn't a single false note in any of their performances. It's tightly plotted and kept me on the literal edge of my seat for much of the movie, something that almost never happens in a thriller. It's also that all-too-rare thing, a science fiction movie that assumes that 21st century scientists and astronauts are likely to have a passing familiarity with classic science fiction, making for at least one really cute gag. I don't know what else to say about this one other than that if you get a chance to see it on the big screen and you like actual science in your science fiction, track this one down.

SiCKO

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 04:38:55 GMT

First of all, how is SiCKO as a movie? Really good. Much better than Fahrenheit 9/11, about on par with Roger and Me, not quite as good as Bowling for Columbine. And despite Moore's long history of taking cheap shots, oddly enough this one comes up almost too short on cheap shots. Yes, it opens with one of Bush's more over-played Bushisms, but it's fascinating to what extent he white-washes Hillary Clinton's health care proposal, to what extent that he literally fawns all over someone who, by his own politics and if he were honest, he ought to loathe. There's a fascinating twist ending where, given the perfect opportunity to take the ultimate cheap shot at one of his enemies, he does the exact opposite, and reaps the benefit; maybe he'll learn from this the limited value of cheap shots. Like Roger and Me and unlike Fahrenheit 9/11, SiCKO actually maintains its narrative, it actually more or less works as a movie. Unlike Bowling for Columbine, though, it doesn't deliver any particularly new insights into its subject, presents few if any surprises, and it again comes up short of Bowling for Columbine in that the director's point of view, his position, doesn't change. Oh, he pretends that it does, but it's a broad-wink sham, a blatantly shallow pretense; unlike Bowling for Columbine, he comes out the end of this movie having learned that he was right, having proved exactly what he set out to prove. On the other hand, I'll say this for SiCKO: it works very well as a human story, as a tear-jerker in spots. There is a whole lot less silliness in this than in most of Moore's films. What humor there is is brief and frequently gallows humor. In fact, it's pretty darned earnest. In fact, it rather resembles the ultimate Frontline or Dateline or Nova documentary rather more than it resembles a Michael Moore jeremiad. Take that as a compliment or not as you will.

Oh, by the way, the film does deliver one surprise, and it's one I laughed myself silly over: watch for the end of Michael Moore's tour of a British hospital. I nearly fell out of my chair. And there's also one equally funny bit in the closing credits; don't leave before they're done.

The counter-attacks began, of course, long before the movie came out. The pro-status-quo side isn't even trying to pretend that his main point isn't true: that costs of health care are going up in America much faster than premiums, and yet somehow the share prices of the insurance companies have roughly quadrupled and their CEO salaries gone up roughly ten-fold, creating a dozen or so new billionaires. Nor are they even trying to impeach his witnesses, ex-employees from inside those companies who testify (in one clip, under oath) that they were specifically ordered to kill as many customers as possible to save money, that their pay and bonuses were tied specifically to the number of life-saving treatments they denied, and another witness who was a private investigator who flatly admits that he was paid to find fraudulent reasons to retroactively discontinue people's policies once they developed expensive illnesses. No, the rebuttals all amount to one claim: even if all of that is true, the insurance industry lobbyists and their paid-off crooked or self-deceiving political hacks insist on telling you, "socialized medicine" is even worse.

And that is the most valuable part of Michael Moore's film. Believe whatever else you will, he shows you right there on film that this is a lie. And who are you going to believe, as the wife having sex with another man said when she got caught in the act (as the joke goes), me or your lying eyes? "Socialized medicine impoverishes doctors and puts them out of work?" Tell that to the Parisian general practitioner (general practitioner!) who earns $200k per year for (like everybody in France) 35 hours per week of work with 5 weeks paid vacation. "It generates a crushing tax load?" After paying his "crushing tax burden" that same doctor lives in a million dollar 3-story town home in a fashionable district, drives a new Audi luxury sedan, and he and his wife spend their vacations traveling the globe. "The waiting times are much longer?" Moore drives straight from a Michigan hospital, where patients in that waiting room told him they'd been waiting for up to 18 hours to see a triage nurse, to a Canadian hospital right across the border, with an equally crowded waiting room, where people said they'd seen a doctor within 20 minutes, tops. "The service is much worse?" Tell me that after you see the free birthing suite in a London hospital, after you watch him ride with a Paris doctor whose practice promises after-hours house calls in 30 minutes or less for even routine medical care, all free. "We can't afford it?" If Cuba can afford to deliver as much care for free as they do (and let me tell you, even if the worst things I've heard are true and my eyes are lying to me, even if somehow Havana General hospital fooled the cameras, it's still better care than half of my friends' insurance, or lack thereof, gives them), if they can afford to do even that much despite 50 years of US economic sanctions, the loss of the USSR as a patron, and no export economy to speak of then why can't we afford to give at least that much to all of our people, too?

And frankly, how convinced are we supposed to be if the best argument against single payer is that it delivers no better service than our private insurance system does, when our private insurance system costs two to three times the average for other countries, and yet we still end up with higher infant mortality and lower life expectancy? "Single-payer is no better?" For the documented substantial savings in taxpayer money and the documented slight increase in life expectancy and equally well documented decrease in infant mortality, I'll cheerfully accept even "no worse."

Look. This is an increasingly hard subject for me to stay calm about, to even pretend to be calm about. Not because I know too many people who've been hurt, no, I'm too Aspie for that to be it. No, I'm prone to fits of boiling rage over this subject because what we have here is to health care policy what young-earth Creationism is to the physical sciences. How so? Look, way the holy hell back in the 1920s we had two dueling hypotheses. They were good, scientific, testable hypotheses. One says that "the private sector delivers better, more affordable health care than universal single-payer health care does." The other says that "universal single-payer health care delivers better, more affordable health care than the private sector does." And you know what? Back in 1920, those were both perfectly plausible hypotheses. Both had roughly equally high quality theoretical justifications. So one by one, nations around the world have tried one hypothesis, the other, or both. And if it weren't for the fact that both of these hypotheses have been carefully and thoroughly tested, in dozens of national experiments spanning at least one entire human lifetime, I'd have a lot more patience for the fact that we're still arguing about this. But the fact is that this experiment has been done, and the results of that experiment are no more ambiguous than the evidence that the earth is older than 6,000 years. Period. Those of you defending the multi-billion-dollar rake-off the insurance company CEOs and their investors are making as theoretically justified because, according to your theory, it should benefit the rest of us, too? Your theory has been tested, and it's wrong. Not "I don't like it," not "I don't agree with your theory," not "I have different priorities than you do," it is actually, demonstrably, proven completely false. Your theory has been flatly disproven, and it requires substantial intentional blindness or intellectual dishonesty to say otherwise. Don't believe me? Watch the film. Don't want to be swayed by what you call "meaningless anecdotes" and "leftist propaganda," then go and read the policy analyses, of which tons have been published in the last few years, all of them (except the ones directly funded by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries) saying exactly what I just said. Won't watch the film or read the independent scientific analyses of your claims? Then you're being willfully blind or intellectually dishonest, and I've had it up to here with you.

But before I finish with the subject (for now, bet your bottom dollar I will come back to it off and on until I win or die), let me say one more thing, not related to the movie, about the much-repeated claim that having any portion of our health care system for ordinary people paid for out of tax dollars is "socialized medicine" and that "socialized medicine" is the "thin entering wedge" of Communism. There's a book that I'm going to continue to hype until everybody I know has read it, a 1942 best seller by Philip Wyle called Generation of Vipers. Back when he was a new writer, his day job during the 1930s was working for Miami, Florida's then-new city health department. And the biggest health threat that Miami faced in the 1930s was cholera. The city averaged at least one city-wide cholera epidemic per year, affecting everybody, the rich and the poor. The cause of city-wide cholera epidemics has been known to epidemiologists since Victorian times: if anybody, anybody at all in a city, has fecal coliform bacteria in their washing water, they will get it on their skin, and spread it to every surface they touch. The only way to prevent recurring city-wide cholera epidemics is to provide every home with clean drinking and washing water. Period. Nothing else that has been tried ever works. So in the 1930s, the health department lobbied hard for a bond issue to fund Miami's first municipal water system, one intended to run a water main to every neighborhood in Miami, not just the richer neighborhoods. Do you know who the most vocal opponent of it was? The American Medical Association.

And you had better, by now, be able to predict what their argument was. They argued that it is every American family's personal responsibility to provide clean water to themselves and their children. If Americans don't want their children to die of cholera, they said, then poor people need to spend less money on "luxuries" or get a second job and spend a little more to get their own clean water. Making it the taxpayers' responsibility to provide poor people with clean water just gives them one less incentive to work hard and get ahead, they said. It's socialism, plain and simple, they said, and they went further and predicted that if Miami built a municipal drinking water system it would be the first step in the inevitable and rapid takeover of the United States by Communists. At the end of the decade, the voters decided that even Communism might be better than having to sweep up the bodies after yet another cholera epidemic, and over substantial objections from the AMA and from politicians they passed that bond issue, and Miami got a municipal water system. The cholera epidemics stopped. And yet here we are 70 years later, and still no Communist revolution in the US. Why is that? Because they were wrong. It really is that simple. And they kept being wrong. Literally ever single advance in public health care since then, from fluoridation to the polio vaccine, from city-wide pest control to private health insurance companies, from citywide sanitary sewers to Social Security and Medicare, has been attacked by the same lobbying groups as "creeping socialism" that would, they keep threatening us, inevitably lead to the entire country being turned into a Soviet gulag. How many times do they have to keep being wrong about that before you realize that they either just plain don't know what they're talking about or else they're lying to you?

A thought for you, on your way out the door to see SiCKO

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 05:07:10 GMT

You are going to see SiCKO, aren't you? Of course you are.

In response to the arguments in this movie, expect a lot of conservatives, both Republican and Democratic ones, to tell you how much more efficient private health insurance companies are than any government-run health plan could possibly be. They'll tell you that any health plan, government or private, has to ration health care because there simply isn't enough money to give everybody everything they could possibly ask for. And that part is true. But then they'll tell you that any private health insurance company has to, by definition, be more efficient than the government at doing that rationing because they can't dump any excess costs onto the taxpayers. Don't believe it.

Let me tell you a story of something that's happening right now to a talented (and good looking) semi-professional animé cosplayer I know; I'd give you her LJ handle, but I don't have permission yet and I don't know how widely she's willing to be publicized. Right now, she has been in more or less constant pain for several weeks. She desperately needs surgery on her wisdom teeth. If she doesn't get it soon, the pain will probably increase until she is unable to work. Her health insurance has offered to cover the several thousand dollar cost of the surgery ... but not the $500 or so cost of the anaesthesia. That's right: they are offering to pay for it if she is willing to have her jaw cracked open and major, painful surgery done on head, if she's willing to have it done while she's awake and feeling every bit of it that ordinary novocaine can't numb. Do I have to say why they would cover one but not the other? You and I both know why not: they know damned well that nobody will do that, which gets them off the hook for having to pay for the surgery. That way, her pain will increase until she's unemployed, and therefore no longer on her employer's health insurance plan. Then they can collect the premiums on whoever her employer hires to replace her, up until they get sick and get replaced too, without ever having to pay out. And they won't be the one who picks up the tab for the payroll and Social Security taxes she would have paid. You, the taxpayer will. And they won't be the one who pays for her unemployment payments. You, the taxpayer, will, through higher unemployment premiums through your employer. If, and I assume it won't come to this but if, she ends up crippled or brain damaged from the infection and ends up on permanent Social Security Disability Insurance for it, it won't be her health insurance company that pays for it. It'll be you, the taxpayer.

So why would anybody pay for this? Why do they? Aren't the insurance companies afraid that you'll go elsewhere? Please. Consider, if you will, the classic 1920s to 1970s Mafia protection racket. You own a store or a restaurant or a bar; the Mafia sends a couple of guys in and they say, "Nice place you got here. Be a shame if anything happened to it. You should pay somebody to protect it." This being the 1920s through the 1970s, the cops aren't going to do anything about them, so you pay. But if somebody other than the Mafia breaks in, are they going to protect you? If the place accidentally catches fire, are they going to put out the fire? As if. You pay for "protection," but they don't have to provide actual protection. They just have to scare you with fears of how much worse it could be if you don't pay. And that, my friend, is everything you need to know about private health insurance.

Don't believe me? Let me offer you two interesting American examples. First of all, consider that one of Michael Moore's publicity stunts involved ferrying victims of the 9/11 terror attacks down to Camp Delta at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Air Station, where the supposed 9/11 mastermind is being held, to try to get them government-provided health care that's at least as good as the health insurance that they're giving Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Hah, hah, very funny. But think it through one step further. This is George Bush's America. If some private health insurance company wanted to collect taxpayer premiums for providing the health care to Gitmo detainees, I guarantee you the Pentagon would write that contract, probably even without competitive bidding. If private health insurance is so much more efficient than government health care, why hasn't any private insurance company offered to pocket what it's costing the government and get rich off of the difference? I'll tell you why not. Because if they denied health care to the alleged terrorists at Gitmo as cavalierly and routinely as they deny health care to their "customers" in the US, the International Committee of the Red Cross would be all over them like a cheap coat of paint. Because providing health care to prisoners of war as bad as the average working class American gets would get you sent to jail for the rest of your life. Private health insurance is, literally, a crime against humanity -- but it's supposedly good enough for you.

Think I'm wrong? Consider this. Nobody should ever expect members of Congress to offer health insurance to the public that's as extensive as what they get. Face it, most of them were millionaires before they went into politics, and all of them are at or near the top of a very competitive professional field, so by definition their salary and benefits are more than yours. But ask yourself this: if private insurance is by definition more efficient than government health care, why doesn't Congress buy a private insurance program for themselves? Why aren't they paying premiums to Aetna or Kaiser Permanente or somebody? If private health insurance actually could deliver better benefits for the same price than government run health insurance, why don't they sign themselves up for better coverage at the same price? I'll tell you why: because they're lying to you. Every single politician who tells you that private health insurance is actually better than government run health care for the same price, or offers a lower price for the same quality of service, knows that it isn't true, and you can tell that because that's not what they vote for themselves if they have the choice.

Enjoy the movie.

Day Watch

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 09:23:09 GMT

Tuesday night I made a point of finally getting around to watching my DVD copy of Timur Bekmambetov's mind bogglingly brilliant movie, the movie that critics all over the world were calling "Russia's Star Wars," Night Watch. Only after I'd bought the DVD did I find out that there is no legal region-1 version with the original actors' voices and the original very cleverly animated subtitles, something that still ticks me off a year later. And I was just as disappointed as I was afraid I was going to be by the quality of the voice dubbing. I know people who've never heard the Russian version who call it pretty good and not distracting, but I'm telling you right now that the people they got to do the English translation just plain aren't half the actors, or at least weren't doing half the acting job that Bekmambetov got out of his original actors. Still, I'm glad I sat through it. (Edited, see below.) I caught more of what was going on, the second time. And more importantly, the reason I watched it was that I knew that Wednesday night, last night, I was going to finally get around to seeing Day Watch, the 2nd movie in the trilogy, on its second to last day on the big screen ~~(and second to last day to see it in Russian with subtitles, in all likelihood)~~ here in St. Louis. (The above link is to Wikipedia; see also the IMDB summary and the trailer on Apple's website.)

I knew that the plot and the number of characters were dense enough that I needed the refresher, and I was right. Oh, there is a brief English-language plot synopsis of the first movie at the beginning of this one. But I have a little more time than they do, so I can do better. About a thousand years ago a single spell gone awry very nearly resulted in the end of the world, by accidentally creating two vast supernatural armies of Light and Darkness. The battle that almost became Armageddon was instead negotiated into a truce, in which both sides' vampires, shapeshifters, prophets, psychics, witches, sorcerers, and so forth agreed not to commit violence against each other, or against humans without the other side's written permission, on pain of death; in sufficiently egregious cases, a truce violation could reignite the war and end the world. In the previous movie, our hero was just an alcoholic seer and rookie member of the Night Watch, the good-guy police force that monitors the bad guys for treaty violations. (The opposite side has their own police force watching the good guys, the Day Watch.) While trying to avert a prophesy that could lead to the end of the world, trying to track a victim of the same curse that created the Light Others and the Dark Others in the first place, Anton lost track of the way he was being lured by the leader of the Dark Army into a trap. That leader, General Zavulon, had better seers; he knew that ancillary to the prophesy that was coming true was another prophesy. He figured out that there was about to be another Great Other awakened, someone at his own insanely high power level, and that according to the prophesy whatever side the new Great Other chose would win the long war. Anton fell right into the trap; the Great Other was his own 12 year old son, whom he'd tried to have murdered by witchcraft before he was born, and Anton accidentally almost killed him again and it was Zavulon who, through carefully practiced timing, saved the kid. So when this movie begins, the setup is that the Light Army hasn't given up yet, but they know the odds are stacked hugely against them.

What I had missed the first time through is that the odds were stacked against them already. General Geser of the Light Others had long ago noticed that even though every Other was given a free and fair choice, many more were choosing Dark. "It's easier for a man to snuff out the light within himself than to fight the darkness around him," as Anton's fellow Day Watch cop Bear put it. And frankly, the Dark Others, being up to their neck in the Russian mafia, are a lot more stylish: better looking, better dressed, driving much flashier cars, almost entirely working in the entertainment industry, and for the most part living in much more beautiful apartments. By comparison, the Night Watch, the Light Others, live in slums and dress in cast-offs and make their living pretending to work for the electric company. So Geser descended, over a decade ago, to using "live bait" to trick Dark Others into treaty violations. That's how Anton ended up hiring that witch in the first place, that he was set up by Light Others and referred to her, meant to be too good an opportunity for murder for her to pass up. Geser's been using this tactic over and over again, and the morality of it and the random human casualties be damned, because he's desperate. (And there are hints that it's backfired on him, that the Dark Others are bringing this up to Others they find to convince them that the Light side is just as evil, just hypocritical about it.) And that's why Zavulon is eager to find a way to get the treaty dissolved that won't backlash on him; he knows that the numbers are way on his side right now, and if anybody does survive Armageddon, it'll be his people, not Geser's.

So that's the setup for this movie: Anton, both to prevent the end of the world and to win back his son, is absolutely desperate to find a prohibited magic object from centuries before, the Chalk of Fate. With it, the wielder can change any decision he's made in the past, not so much changing the world ordinarily but at least changing how his own life turned out; he wants to send a message back to his young self not to accept the witch's deal. Geser has to at least try to stop him, but once again Zavulon has way, way out-thought the Night Watch. He has his own elaborate plot, one that starts with framing Anton for murder. Geser and the Night Watch think that's where it ends, with protecting Anton's son from Anton, protecting the Dark Others from losing their new Great Dark Other. No, it goes much farther than that, and Zavulon wants the Chalk of Fate found and used, even though he daren't touch it himself, for his own reasons. And his goal is still to start the war that may end the world.

Is it any good? Yes. But I can see why it's not getting as much hype as the first movie did from the American press, because it isn't quite as good. And it's not the inevitable "second movie of a trilogy" slump, either. No, on the contrary, I think that it's amazing how well Bekmambetov beat that curse, avoided all (and I do mean all) of the standard "middle movie" traps. And it's certainly not for the cinematography or art direction or special effects, all of which are top-notch. (Although the subtitles' effects got toned down perceptibly, and I missed that.) And the actors are still doing about as great a job or better. And they're even given some great stuff to work with, like the great scenes of the evolving relationship between Anton and Svetlana, the Other whose curse nearly destroyed the world in the first movie, who is now his trainee on the force. But maybe that's my problem, that it's only some great stuff to work with. Not many of the other characters felt as real to me, felt as well fleshed out, felt like they had their own lives going on during this movie. It probably also didn't help that the pop-culture in-jokes are a lot less international, a lot more specifically Russian this time, and I didn't get most of them until I checked Wikipedia. Nor did it improve my attitude that the macguffin is basically a time-travel plot device, and I think that time travel is a cheap and tawdry plot device. And on top of that it does have one glaring problem that the first movie doesn't have: I'm not sure that the logic of it actually makes sense, that it actually works well by its own rules.

But I'm glad I saw it, I still recommend it, I absolutely recommend that you see the original version on the big screen if you can possibly do so rather than whatever butchery they do translating it to English, and I absolutely am still looking forward to Dusk Watch.

Edit, Later: Flying baby crap. When was somebody going to tell me that I do own the original Russian version with the cool subtitles? That it's a 2-sided disc, that the unlabeled side is the Russian-language edition? It doesn't say so anywhere on the packaging, or on the disc side 1 menus, or even in the Amazon reviews or DVD details. I only found it out by accident just now while running Google searches to try to find bootlegs of the original, only to find a review of the disc I have that mentioned side 2.

Year of the Three-quel: PotC3

Sat, 26 May 2007 06:12:27 GMT

Here's the thing you need to know going into Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. The producer that the Kim Possible TV series parodied as "Jerry Blamhammer" has an instinct that most studios have learned, by now, to throttle him back on, and that is that Jerry Blamhammer's first rule of making a bigger movie is to make a bigger movie. You can sum up his oeuvre in one word: MORE! Well, for PotC3, Disney not only didn't throttle him back, they seem to have egged him on. If what the fans wanted out of the PotC franchise was more of whatever it was they liked about any one of the previous two movies, this movie delivers: more dime store mysticism, more fairy tale elements, more sword fighting, more monsters, more CGI (so much more there's barely room for the actors), more pirate ships, more cannon fire, more humor, more sex, more violence, more explosions, more betrayals, more tragedy, more true love, more corpses, more severed limbs, more comic relief including much more literal insanity from Jack, more politics, more completely unforeshadowed plot twists, more guys who can't keep it in their pants when Elizabeth Swan is around, and just plain more more more more more. (That's right, not just more, not just more more more, but more more more more more. Seriously.) And, of course, obviously more movie to fit it all into: a numbing two hours and forty five minutes of getting mugged by a movie.

More backstory too: not just obvious ones like finally giving us at least some of Jack's back story, but also backstory on Tia Dalma, the Pirate's Code, the Flying Dutchman, Davy Jones, and all nine of the world's major pirate fleets. This movie makes so many diversions into backstory I'm surprised they didn't try to fit in the the whole backstory of the East India Company, or for that matter England. I guess they had to save something for the sequel. Yeah, that's right, the sequel. If nothing else, one sequel comes out in a couple of weeks or so, because Disney has made it clear that the massively multiplayer online game "Pirates of the Caribbean Online" is an explicit sequel to "At World's End" in exactly the same literal way that "The Matrix Online" is a sequel to The Matrix: Revolutions. More movies, too? Hard to say; I've seen comments from other people who saw the same movie I did who claim that they obviously left it open for a sequel, but if so, it's rather obviously going to have to be a smaller movie for reasons I can't go into without spoiling plot twists.

Is it any good? Look, three things. First of all, does it matter? You probably went to see Star Wars 3. You probably went to see Shrek 3 and Spiderman 3. Some of you probably even went to see Matrix 3 and Die Hard 3 and Lethal Weapon 3 and you're going to go see Ocean's 13, that is to say Ocean's 11 3, when it comes out too. It doesn't matter if it's any good or not, you're going to go see it. Resent it as much as I did going in if you like, but you're probably not going to get out of giving The Mouse your expletive-deleted money, not unless you want to feel completely culturally illiterate, not unless you're willing to walk around for the next several months having no idea what the people around you are talking about. If anything, considering that Disney knows that, that they were willing to spend umpteen gazillion dollars on it and let Jerry Blamhammer get away with stuff that no other Disney "kids movie" would do, that the MPAA would have stuck an R on if anybody but Disney tried it, in order to try to give you your money's worth while they vacuum out your wallet, reflects sort of well on them I guess. And secondly, I am the wrong person to ask. I disliked the first movie. I hated the second movie even more, having only seen it because friends asked me to go along with them, as a favor to them. I figure to spend at least some of this Memorial Day weekend, since I'm not actually busy for a change, rewatching Cutthroat Island and rereading Cyrus Karraker's Piracy Was a Business to wash the sour and insipid taste of "stupid fairy tale pirate" out of my head. And three, because I really didn't care about the second movie in the series and have tried fairly hard to forget it, I forgot enough of the subplots from that movie that I found it almost completely impossible to keep track of exactly why every character was betraying every other character in the movie at any given time, which made it hard for me to care.

So all of that being said? I thought it was cool looking and I got a few good laughs out of it. I saw it at matinée prices and don't regret the money; I spent two and a half hours round trip on the bus system plus the nearly three hours of the movie and don't feel entitled to demand that five-plus hours of my life back. (As opposed to, say, the Tomb Raider movie, which I got to see on the big screen for free and felt like I overpaid.) So if feeling the way I do about this franchise I found it cool looking and intermittently funny, those of you who "OMFG-can't-wait-squeee!!!!" love this franchise are probably going to like it a lot more than I did. But then, that kind of goes without saying. Oh, and I did really like some of the music; I could probably use a good recording of the chanty that the movie begins with, that scene actually gave even me chills.

I was also left with one serious head-scratching question. I adore female action heroes (when not played by Angelina Jolie), so it truly improved the picture for me that in the third movie Elizabeth Swan is, if not as acrobatic as Will and Jack, at least as good with both sword and pistol as they are, maybe even better, kicking backside and not even bothering to take names with the best of them. But where did this come from? It took both Jack and Will a lifetime to master the sword; was there some foreshadowing in the 2nd movie that I've forgotten that explains how she got better at it than they did in the couple of days or weeks between movie 2 and movie 3? I raised no objection to the same plot device in the Shrek series because Shrek is a comedy. In this action-adventure series, am I just supposed to suspend disbelief and say, "So she's a natural. Who knew?" Even more than some of what seemed weird to me about the metaphysics in the movie, this is the part that still has me scratching my head.

(P.S. Do not get up to leave when the credits roll. There's one more whole scene hidden after the credits.)

Year of the Three-quel: Shrek 3 better than it has any right to be

Sat, 19 May 2007 05:20:25 GMT

Like most people, I loved Shrek. Heck, I am Shrek.

Like most people above the age of about 12, I hated Shrek 2 with a fiery passion. It had the worst case I've ever seen of what Frederick P. Brooks called "The Second System Effect," where a team with one success under their belt tries to cram everything they had to leave out of the first one into the second one, "now that they know that they can." Shrek 2 tried to cram so many quips and gags into it that it left no time for any more than a vestigial plot, and never slowed down to actually show us any feelings from its characters, stripping us of any reason to care what happens to them. Worse, the gags themselves weren't even that good. So honestly, if you haven't seen Shrek 2 yet, spare yourself. I watched it for you, and here's all you need to know to understand Shrek the Third:

Fiona's father is secretly the Frog Prince, but his dis-enchantment got screwed up. He owes his human form to Fairy Godmother, who demanded a price: he had to agree to let her curse his daughter with ogre form by night, and to lock her up in a tower because of the curse. That way Fairy Godmother's son, Prince Charming, could rescue the princess from her tower, break the enchantment, become the hero, marry the princess, and become the next King of Far Far Away. So when Charming and Godmother find out that Shrek has stolen his destiny, they take it quite personally. They launch a plot to discredit Shrek and have Puss in Boots assassinate him, make Charming look like a hero, cure Fiona of being stuck in ogre form, and put things back on track for Charming to marry Fiona and become the heir to the throne. Unsurprisingly, true love wins out, Shrek and Fiona get to keep their happily ever after, Fairy Godmother gets killed, and Charming becomes the laughingstock of the kingdom; the only price the good guys have to pay is that the Frog Prince loses his human form.

So when Shrek the Third begins with the Frog King dying of old age (he's quite old for a frog, you know) and anointing Shrek as the next king, Shrek faces a very serious problem: while he makes a passable knight, he'd make a rotten king. But the only way he can abdicate is if he can find another suitable heir; fortunately, the Frog King gave him one clue. While Shrek is off on his quest to find that missing heir, Charming raises an army, storms the castle, captures the crown by force, locks the dowager queen and Fiona and the other princesses in the dungeon, and makes plans to murder Shrek the minute he returns from his quest.

Look, this movie has one big black mark against it going in: it is as predictable as the day is long. Maybe more so. Shrek had its surprise ending. Shrek 2, as execrable as it was, had something of a surprise ending. You know how Shrek the Third is going to end, minus only a few wisecracks and some fight choreography, 10 minutes into it. And the franchise has long, long since run out of any ogre and talking donkey jokes, and there weren't really many talking cat jokes left after Shrek 2. It's also got one minor problem: Rupert Everett's Prince Charming isn't half as much fun of a villain as John Lithgow's Lord Farquad was, or even Jennifer Saunders' Fairy Godmother. So without any surprises left to reveal, and without much of any new jokes to tell, and stuck with a villain that the previous movie had painted as a pathetic whiner, this movie had one and only one hope at all of getting anybody to care enough to want to see it more than once or to buy the video or to even touch any of the merchandise. It desperately, desperately needed to fix the glaring hole in Shrek 2 and make you care what happens to these characters.

Well, guess what? Surprise! They actually remembered what made Shrek work, emotionally -- the quiet scenes, where the characters let their defenses down for a second, where they're too tired to wisecrack, where they actually show how they feel. The resulting movie isn't quite as good as Shrek, no. That was never going to happen. As David Gerrold pointed out a long time ago, the problem with writing sequels is that a movie is supposed to be the story of the most interesting thing that ever happened to its main character. If it's not, then why aren't you telling that story instead? But Shrek the Third is every bit as good as any three-quel could be. There's even an action sequence every bit as good as the "rescuing Fiona from the dragon's keep" sequence in the first movie: sit up and enjoy every second of it as soon as you hear the mash-up of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" and Heart's "Barracuda" begin, because you're in for a lot of fun. And after that, even if you saw the ending coming from a million miles away, I suspect that like me, you will care.

Somebody PLEASE tell me this is an April Fool's Day joke?

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 09:12:20 GMT

The following news article was just quoted in kallisti's blog: John Cotter, "Chaplain advises Wiccan soldiers," Edmunton Sun, 3/31/07. The dateline says 3/31, not 4/1. But I hope to the gods that this will turn out to have been an April Fool's Day joke in extraordinarily poor taste. Not that even retroactively admitting, or even falsely claiming, it was a hoax will save the thousands of lives this fuck-up will cost.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- From jokingly advising Wiccan soldiers to keep their clothes on when celebrating the spring equinox to coaxing troops to talk about the trauma of surviving a roadside bomb, Canadian Forces chaplains are in Afghanistan for everyone. ¶ Maj. Malcolm Berry smiles as he recalls being approached on the NATO base in Kandahar a few weeks ago by a group of soldiers of the Wiccan faith - a neo-pagan religion strongly tied to nature.

"They wanted to welcome the spring in a ceremony where they are very thankful to Mother Earth and the new moon with pagan prayers," said Berry, the senior chaplain for Task Force Afghanistan. ¶ "We had no difficulty with that. We just didn't want them to do it 'sky-clad' (naked) in this environment because it would be too dangerous." ¶ The six Wiccans - a Canadian and five Americans - were invited to hold their service outside the Christian fellowship centre. ¶ They were given water, candles and food that they were welcomed to eat inside the centre after the ceremony. ...

Jesus fuck a monkey.

It's good news if you're a Canadian Wiccan in Afghanistan, I grant. And it's part and parcel of what any properly supervised, properly educated military chaplain is required to do for the soldiers in his or her unit whether that chaplain is American or Canadian. But for the love of fucking god, who in the flaming hell's bright idea was it to talk to a mother fucking reporter about this?

Do I have to remind you that even the most secular and liberal Muslims agree that the Koran teaches the mandatory death penalty for polytheists and nature worshipers? And that, as such things go, the Islamic culture in Afghanistan isn't consistently even liberal enough (despite clear and unambiguous commands in the Koran) to tolerate other "people of the Book," fellow Abrahamic monotheists, Christians and Jews? If this article gets translated into the local languages and passed around inside Afghanistan, it's the next best thing to handing the Taliban two full battalions of reinforcements, right at the beginning of spring insurgency season, and in a year when the Americans are so over-extended in Iraq that we've got nobody left to send into Afghanistan if the local population turns hard against us. And that's true even if this turns out to be an April Fool's Day hoax.

Fucking Neopagans and Wiccans; I swear they don't have six brain cells among them in the whole god damned movement. They think it's so fucking obvious that what they have is so beautiful and sweet and so obviously true that it never for once, never in a million fucking years, ever occurs to one when to shut the fuck up about it. And that is exactly what whichever soldier it was who talked to a fucking reporter about this should have done instead, had a nice hot steaming cup of Shut The Fuck Up.

This pisses me off so badly I can't even see straight, and the language filters are shot completely to hell. I was already on the edge of boiling over about the war in Afghanistan already. The Emmy-winning docu-drama Flight 93 was on The History Channel tonight when I was flipping channels. It occurred to me early on that for a movie I'd been intending to see, wow, I'd made plenty of excuses not to get around to it. And you know what, it turned out that I was emotionally unprepared to be reminded just how personally I take the story of the heroes of United flight 93, how emotionally invested in it I am. But those men and women sacrificed their last 10 minutes of life, 10 more minutes they could have spent on the phone with their loved ones, to save ... well, frankly, to save an empty but highly symbolic building, since the Capitol had been evacuated by then. But more importantly, they died having the honor before all men and all holy gods of being the first of us to strike back at the bastards who did this. And all that rage boiled back up in me, alongside wracking pain of the guilt I was feeling over the sheer pornography of listening to re-enactments of those people's last phone calls to their families. All through it I was sobbing uncontrollably.

And over the last few minutes, in the background you could hear news announcers making three promises, from the Bush administration, that turned out to be total fucking lies: that the World Trade Center would be swiftly rebuilt, that we would strike back against the people who did this with overwhelming force, and that the people who planned this would be swiftly brought to justice. And all three were total fucking lies, and where oh gods where is the anger over this? Ground zero is still a hole in the ground, we sent 1/50th the guys into Afghanistan we should have sent, and Osama bin Laden probably spent this evening having a relaxing cup of coffee in a café in Karachi after an errand there before heading back to his comfortable offices in Waziristan or Northwest Territories, Pakistan. And now it's spring, and the re-armed and reinforced Taliban are pouring across the border into Afghanistan from Pakistan again, and in the middle of all of this we find fucking Neopagan Witches so fucking stupid and so fucking self-centered that even with their own asses in a sling, with Taliban cross-hairs hovering over their positions in the Taliban's old capital city, they have to brag to God and all the world about how they thumb their fucking noses at Afghanistan's laws.

And you know what I just don't fucking get? These are Canadian peace-keeping troops. I thought they were smarter than that. Yes, even the Neopagan Wiccan ones. The Canadian army sets the gold standard for peace-keeping. They were the first to set up an institute to study it scientifically and teach it as an elite military discipline. What the Canadians don't know about peacekeeping would fit in a thimble. I could calligraph everything they don't know about peacekeeping on my thumbnail using a Speedball C-3 point. Where in fuck did some reporter find Canadian peacekeepers this fucking dumb?

I haven't been this angry in years. I am literally half-blind with anger, tunnel-blind with rage. To quote codeb6, "I really should have taken that job slapping stupid people."

The Un-Princess Disney Princess

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 06:24:27 GMT

A week or so ago at a party, one of the questions thrown out in the conversation was, "Who's your favorite female Disney character?" Wow, I had a hard time with that one. As in, it took me over an hour to think of even one I could stand. (Important caveat here: I have not yet seen Disney's version of Beauty and the Beast, which I'm told I'd love. I just haven't gotten around to it.) But once I did, I realized something genuinely odd that's going on here. Disney has been working hard to shoehorn every single property they could possibly fit into their bajillion-selling Disney Princess product line, including characters that just plain aren't princesses, like Tinkerbell, and Belle. But oddly enough, over here there's this one Disney character who could very easily fit into the product line. Unlike Belle and Tinkerbell, she is, in fact, a royal princess, the crown princess and heir to the throne of her people. So what's she doing missing from the Disney Princess collection?

I wonder if I know. True story: Some years back, while I was rent-a-copping, I got brought in for one night to stay overnight in a mall Disney Store; IBM was in there updating their registers, and the store manager didn't want to stay all night and watch them. This left me in an empty Disney store with nothing to do for way too many hours between when IBM's people left and the store's people arrived in the morning. And I noticed very early in the evening that parts of the store made me more uncomfortable than others. So once things quieted down, I went into a mild trance, defocused my eyes a little, and let myself wander the aisles without thinking, trying to psychically sense the heart of the evil that I was feeling, the center of it, the most unrelentingly evil object in the store. To my vast surprise, the object that I found in my hands, when I came out of my trance and refocused my eyes, was in fact just exactly that evil.

It was a children's story book in the Disney Princess collection, obviously meant to be read aloud from to very young pre-schoolers. It took five Disney classic animated movies and boiled each of them down to a two-panel cartoon. Each page was a frame from the movie; the left hand page had the first half of a sentence, and the right hand page showed a frame from near the end of the movie with the other half of the sentence. Here they are, the five movie synopses as best as I can reconstruct them from memory:

"Cinderella thought she was happy taking care of her stepmother and her stepsisters ... then she married a Prince and became truly happy!"
"Snow White thought she was happy living with her friends, the Seven Dwarves ... then she married her Prince and became truly happy!"
"Pocahontas had many animal friends ... then she fell in love with John Smith and became truly happy!"
"Belle thought she was happy with all of her books ... then she fell in love with the Beast and became truly happy!"
"Princess Jasmine loved her family and her life in the palace ... then she married Aladdin and became truly happy!"

Great. Nice to know that Disney thinks that the most important message to take away from all five of those films is, "No woman, however happy or hard working or successful, can possibly be truly happy until she falls in love with a prince." That's not even a fair summary of some of those! Now let me provide you with some contrast to that disgusting message, a contrast that somehow, against all odds, came out of the same company.

Not nearly enough people have seen the 90 minute movie Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins and the 62 half-hour episode cartoon series "Buzz Lightyear of Star Command" that followed it. Together they make up a retroactive prequel to Toy Story; these are meant to be the cartoons that the Buzz Lightyear toy from that movie was marketed from. I say "not nearly enough people" because this is on my short list, alongside Gargoyles and TaleSpin and Kim Possible (and to a lesser extent Darkwing Duck and Disney's Aladdin), of Disney animated series that were so much better than they had any right to be. In fact, for all that it's meant to be more of a parody of a space opera science fiction TV series than actual science fiction, I'd still put it up there in the top 10 science fiction TV series of all time. The premise is that there is a Galactic Federation of more-or-less good-guy species, and in orbit around Capital Planet is a space station called Star Command, the headquarters of the Federation's elite inter-planetary law enforcement, rescue, and counter-espionage service, the Space Rangers. And one Space Ranger stands out above all the others for his skill, his bravery, his unbroken string of successes, and his relentless publicity: Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear of Star Command (voiced by Patrick Warburton, one of my all-time favorite voice actors).

In the pilot episode, against his wishes, Buzz gets stuck with 3 "partners:" a rookie with a crush on him, a miniature robot that was programmed with Buzz's personality and skills (before becoming corrupted), and a janitor who really wishes he could be a Space Ranger and has studied the Rangers obsessively but can't pass the physical. But Buzz has no choice but to rely on their help, when push comes to shove, because the four of them are the only escapees when the Evil Emperor Zurg uses his mind-control Mega-Ray to take over Star Command. As you might guess, this being a cartoon, they end up making a great team. But it isn't until episode 47, "First Missions," that they give us the full backstory on the rookie with a crush on Buzz, long enough that we've seen some serious character development by then, and suddenly it all snaps into focus why the Tangean crown princess, Space Ranger Mira Nova (voiced by Nicole Sullivan, another of my all-time favorite voice actors), is just so cool and why she stands head and shoulders above every other female character that Disney has ever allowed onto the screen under the Disney imprint.

The Tangeans were, so far as anybody can tell, the first species in this galaxy to evolve intelligence. They explored the galaxy, and concluded that there was nothing interesting there and nobody to talk to. So they retreated to their homeworld and set about improving themselves, technologically and evolutionarily. They've improved themselves to the absolute peak of physical perfection, and to the theoretical limit of humanoid intelligence. They've developed their psychic powers beyond those any other species could imagine, to the point where even small children learn to phase themselves through solid matter as a routine part of growing up. And their technology is sufficiently perfected that they see no benefit to be had from tinkering with it further, since it meets every need they have unobtrusively, with no environmental impact, and with no possibility of break-down. They've spent the millennia since then dedicated to advancement in the arts. In the intervening many thousands of years, the rest of the galaxy developed sentience, made contact with each other, and (except for Zurg's tiny despotic empire) learned to live together in peace and harmony in a Galactic Federation ... without yet even meeting the Tangean's standards for sentience; they see all other species, however intelligent, as little better than monkeys. And not without cause.

But when somebody develops a weapon that stops Tangeans from being able to phase through solid matter, it becomes trivially easy to take the whole planet hostage, since their rooms stopped having actual doors thousands of years ago. Buzz Lightyear of Star Command swoops in to rescue them, because, frankly, this is the kind of thing he does. And he saves the day, with some help from a very young teenage Tangean, princess Mira Nova. His rescue rather disgusts the rest of the Tangeans, who didn't feel particularly severely inconvenienced by being captured and held hostage, and who remain convinced that given a little more time to think about it, they would have solved the problem themselves in a way that was more intelligent, harmonious, artistic, and civilized, and, frankly, with a lot less disgusting violence and random property damage than was caused by Buzz Whatever the Space Monkey, or whatever he calls himself. But Mira was totally smitten by this handsome, brave stranger who thought nothing of putting himself in harm's way to rescue people who looked down on him and expected nothing in return. She threw herself, romantically, at Buzz ... who did something that almost no Disney hero has the integrity to do. He told her no. He told her that developing a schoolgirl crush on someone just because he rescues you isn't healthy, and that she knows nothing about him, and he left.

But for crying out loud, she's a teenage schoolgirl with a crush, do you think she's going to listen to him? Heck no. Since the only way she can get close to her hero is to follow him into the Space Rangers, she abandons her duties as the royal heir, becomes the first Tangean to leave Tangeah in millenia, travels to Capital Planet, and applies to the Space Ranger academy. There, Buzz's boss Commander Nebula and his technical staff of Little Green Men ran into a problem: she really is too good. She could learn everything they asked her to learn instantly. Buzz had been the only person in Ranger history to get a perfect score on all tests and all combat simulations, but she breezed through those tests so easily that the LGMs had to invent harder tests just to make excuses for why she hadn't graduated instantly. When she joins Team Lightyear, Buzz knows that this schoolgirl crush is going to be a crippling problem for the team, but by the end of that first mission together he knows that he needs her on the team and the risk be damned, because she's just that good.

Furthermore, we find out over the course of the 62 episodes exactly why Commander Nebula was so insistent that Buzz take on this particular partner. Nebula knows that Buzz, frankly, is getting a little too old for the kind of vigorous fieldwork that Space Rangers have to do. Buzz is starting to slow down, is starting to get too cautious, and his accumulated traumas are equipping him with something that's closing in on being full blown clinical paranoia if he keeps this up. Nebula also knows that he himself is way too old to be running the Rangers, that the reason Buzz gets away with so many rules violations is that Nebula's way too old to be managing a guy like Buzz, that he can't keep up with the job. But he can't retire until he grooms his replacement. Long before it dawned on Team Lightyear what the old man was up to, the old man had anticipated a near future, not very long after the end of the series, where it'll be Commander Lightyear running Star Command, and the galaxy's greatest hero will be Space Ranger Mira Nova of Star Command. It ended up taking Mira Nova almost two years to realize what her father, King Nova, and her boss, Commander Nebula, saw instantly: Buzz Lightyear, the galaxy's greatest hero, frankly isn't good enough for her. He's not capable enough, and he's not man enough. Maybe nobody is. But the important thing is that the sooner she realizes this, the sooner she realizes that Buzz is bluffing half the time and sees, in XR's exaggerations of Buzz's worst personality traits, that her idol has feet of clay, the sooner she can become what she was truly destined to be: the greatest hero the galaxy has ever seen.

Sort of makes the other Disney "Princesses" look a little tawdry, doesn't she?

Nothing Mimsical About The Last Mimzy

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 07:19:22 GMT

I'm not going to say that The Last Mimzy is the greatest science fiction film of all time. I'm not even going to rank it in the top 10, not that I have a list ready to hand of my all time favorites. But I am going to say this about it. This is exactly the kind of film that science fiction fans, whenever they gather together, they complain that Hollywood never makes. (And, unsurprisingly, Hollywood didn't make this one. It's Canadian.) It's a science fiction film that takes the genre and its themes seriously, adapted very very well (if not word for word) from one of the classics of golden age science fiction short stories, 1943's "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore (writing together under the pseudonym "Lewis Padgett"). No space opera, no ray guns, no aliens, no monsters, no robots. Well, sort of one robot. Maybe. And admittedly genius kids. But still, if you don't go see this, even after I tell you that it's tremendously fun to watch, very well made, extremely well acted, and that it really rewards careful attention and serious thought, then you forfeit your right to complain that they don't make intelligent science fiction movies any more.

The premise of the movie is that due to some kind of chemical pollution that's been building up over our lifetime, the children alive today are the last generation of true homo sapiens sapiens, the last real human beings. The human-looking beings that replace them will be born without any compassion for each other, or for the environment. This doesn't stop them from advancing technologically over the next 500 years, to levels far beyond ours. But it does mean that they won't mind living full time in environment suits through which they can't touch each other, and it means that when the last war breaks out 500 years from now, nobody will object to the possibility that it might well exterminate all life on Earth, maybe even destroy the planet itself. But one scientist, studying what little history of our time has survived, has concluded that humans up through the 21st century were not just more primitive than his people but genetically superior. And he believes that if he could retrieve a DNA sample from our time, an uncontaminated one, he could devise a cure for lethal lack of empathy.

The catch? Living things can't travel through time. And while it's not that hard for a 26th century scientist to modify a the AI inside a standard children's teaching toy, a robot bunny named Mimzy, to program it to retrieve that DNA sample, it requires a human being with developed psychic abilities and the benefit of a 26th century education to operate the return time machine. There's no way to teach a 20th or 21st century adult how to do these things, the necessary mental flexibility isn't there. So he scattered as many caches as he could at random across slightly over 100 years before the final catastrophe, hoping that at least one of them would be found by his perfect candidate: a highly spiritual child with the genetics of compassion clearly expressed, who's capable of developing psychic abilities, and who is capable (given a small supply of 26th century educational toys) of also learning to master 26th century engineering well enough to operate the time machine in the tiny amount of time that the robot's batteries can stay charged. Because he wasn't able to target them very precisely, only two were ever found. As you might guess, Alice Pleasance Liddell found one, but she couldn't learn the necessary skills to save the future.

Fortunately, one other Mimzy did get found ... near Seattle, in our time, by a pair of children on spring break. One of them has the necessary spiritual and genetic purity and the necessary psychic potential. Her older brother, while only a C-minus student in our educational system, has the potential if taught properly to be a great engineering genius. Which leaves those two kids with the "trivial" problem of hiding the toys from their yuppie parents while they figure out what, exactly, Mimzy wants them to do and how to do it. Then from their parents and his grade school science teacher and the teacher's Tibetan Buddhist girlfriend and the babysitter. And then, when the partially assembled time machine charges itself by briefly sucking all of the electrical power of the the entire northwestern corner of the US electrical grid, hiding it and themselves from a Department of Homeland Security team that thinks that they're looking for terrorists with an electromagnetic pulse weapon. And by the time DHS starts getting involved, Mimzy has explained to the little girl that if she and her brother can't get the bunny back home in time, the entire world will die.

It's a great film. The science of it, and the Tibetan Buddhism that underpins its metaphysics, will probably go past most kids (and most non-science fiction fannish adults), but unless you're really uncomfortable watching a movie you don't fully understand (and most kids aren't), it's still possible to enjoy it as a science fiction thriller. (After all, the lead characters never fully understand it themselves.) And it's absolutely beautiful, and absolutely rewards being seen on a big screen. My advice to anybody who likes "real science fiction" is to race yourself to see this one while it's still in theaters. And absolutely take your kids.

Postscript: Shooter reminds me of a joke from the 1980s

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 08:26:50 GMT

Not long after he got out of the hospital, President Reagan had them bring John Hinkley into the Oval Office. And Reagan told Hinkley, "Son, they tell me that say you didn't mean anything personal by it. I'm a forgiving man, and I'm willing to believe you. I'm issuing you a full presidential pardon. And here, here's your gun back. Oh, hey, did you hear the latest rumor that's going around? They say that Tip O'Neill is sleeping with Jody Foster."

An Angry Liberal with a Really Big Gun: Mark Wahlberg in Shooter

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 05:32:59 GMT

There's something almost quintessentially American about vigilante fiction. Periodically, we Americans, for all our commitment to fair and impartial justice, harbor the fear that sometimes "the fix is in," that for one reason or another there are bad guys that no policeman will arrest, that no prosecutor will indict, that no court would convict. And the more that this suspicion, this horrible toxic suspicion, grows then the more vigilante fiction we see. The urge to say, "the cops won't do anything, so I have to" and pick up a weapon and start kicking butt and taking names has given rise to all kinds of fiction, from the Batman to Sin City, from The Big Sleep to Dirty Harry. And I remember, from my teens in the 1970s, a time when conservatives were convinced that whether motivated by communist subversion or overzealous idealism, the courts had so hamstrung the cops that all kinds of criminals were getting a free pass, and we saw this whole spate of horribly right wing vigilante movies like the Dirty Harry series and the Death Wish series in which white men with big guns decided they'd had enough of these hippies and Latinos and Negroes getting away with murder because the courts were soft on them, and went out on enthusiastic killing sprees.

So I wonder how much of a coincidence it is that the week that we found out that the Bush administration had been conspiring, in the time they had before the Democrats were able to stop them, to find a way to fire any prosecutor who was prosecuting a rich person or a Republican politician, and replace them with Republican opposition research professionals who could be counted on to prosecute any scary looking minority or any successful Democratic politician whenever it was useful to the Republican Party, that we see the first ever left wing vigilante violence exploitation film that I ever remember seeing in my whole life, Antoine Fuqua's Shooter. It stars Mark Wahlberg as a very disillusioned special forces sniper; when we see him at home after his discharge from the military, he's getting his news from websites that tell him "what lies [the Republicans] are telling today" when not reading or re-reading The 9/11 Commission Report. And when a team of assassins working for a thinly disguised Blackwater security group, operating on direct orders from a very thinly disguised Dick Cheney, set him up as the patsy, the fall guy to take the rap for their assassination of a foreign official who was about to embarrass the President by revealing past American war crimes in his country? Well, he knows, in the fine old tradition of vigilante violence exploitation films, that the cops are all crooked and the courts are all crooked and they're all against liberals like him. So he embarks on a scheme to find out who all did this to him, and draw them out into the open where instead of him playing their game, they have to play his game, the game of a special forces sniper.

Considering that this movie puts forth as a heroic quest for justice and as an admirable act the cold-blooded assassination of US government security contractors and Republican politicians, I assume that the right wing web sites will give birth to a porcupine, breach presentation, with all attendant sound effects.

But other than its quirky political implications, how is it as a movie? Not too bad. It covers a lot of the same ground as Syriana, with fewer great actors but a lot more action sequences. And there's a weird quality to the action sequences, in that what you have here are very intense fights where, unless things go pear-shaped for either or both sides, the battle takes several minutes, where each side takes turns shooting and spends 15 to 60 seconds per shot lying down under camouflage practicing yogic breathing, muttering trigonometry and meteorology problems under their breath, and twisting fine-tuning knobs on their rifle scopes. But it still manages to squeeze in the genre-obligatory car chase scene and more than one exploding helicopter. The obligatory thrill of a movie like this comes from throwing the hero into situations that he can't possibly survive and the sitting on the edge of your seat wondering how he's going to survive, and this movie delivers that thrill reliably and repeatedly.

It does start though, if you ask me, with a plot hole the size of a Mack truck: if all you need is a patsy to take the blame for what your conspiracy does, why do you need your patsy to be one of the best special forces snipers in the whole world? You don't have to convince the press that it's possible to shoot at the president! If you tell them that the shot was fired by the worst rifleman in the history of the Marine Corps, cold fired from a never-before-fired mail-order rifle, enough people will believe you that the rest don't matter. You can even tell them that despite a Secret Service cordon, a random heavily-sedated mental patient just randomly walking down the sidewalk can somehow miraculously shoot a president and almost everybody will believe you. If it seems impossible, just chalk it up to luck on the alleged shooter's part; people will buy it, especially if the alternative is to consider the possibility that American history is sometimes changed by the equivalent of coup d'etat. On the other hand, maybe they had a reason for wanting to kill off this particular patsy, because of something he knew. But if you're willing to hand-wave the occasional plot hole, the kind of random improbabilities that plague most conspiracy theory driven thrillers, and you don't mind the fact that sometimes the violence slows way down to stretch out the suspense, it's possible to have a good time watching this movie. It's no The Long Kiss Goodnight, which had a much sexier star and which covered much of the same material but had a lot more fun doing it, but it's not bad.

Locals: Anybody want to join me for a movie?

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 22:37:09 GMT

I'm thinking of catching the 4pm-ish showings of both Shooter and The Last Mimsy this weekend, one on Saturday and one on Sunday, even if I have to take the bus to do it. (The weather's supposed to be favorable.) Anybody free who wants to see them with me?

Urban War-Zone Fantasies ... and Realities

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 05:38:59 GMT

Three things have converged on me regarding the concept of what it must be like to be going through something close to total war in a major urban area. On extensive enthusiastic multiple recommendations from BoingBoing.net, I picked up a copy of Brian Wood's graphic novel DMZ volume 1: On the Ground. I started seeing ads for next Tuesday's DVD release of Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men. And MSNBC just showed a one-hour documentary special edited together from the video diary of NBC's long-time Baghdad correspondent, Richard Engels, "War Zone Diary."

And sadly, I think that BoingBoing got their recommendation wrong. DMZ just doesn't hold up by comparison to the other two. It's an ongoing comic book set in a very near term future where the United States is four years into a civil war. The two sides call themselves the Free USA and the Real USA, and interestingly the book (at least in book 1) never gets around to telling us who the two sides are, or what the war is about. For the purposes of this book, all that matters is that Manhattan island is one battleground of that war. The Free USA are dug into the New York mainland and the Real USA are dug into New Jersey (or maybe vice versa, I'm too lazy to pull it down and look it up again); theoretically neither side controls Manhattan. Our hero, such as he is, is a 20 year old journalism student who ended up being the only survivor of what was supposed to be a news crew from the Real USA side choppering into Manhattan during a cease fire to find out if it's true that there really are still civilians living there. It turns out that even though huge chunks of Manhattan have been bombed into rubble, there are actually still 400,000 civilians living in an area where the Real USA's media and government report that there's nobody left there except a few insurgents and criminal gangs. So our hero retrieves his gear from the wreckage with the improbable assistance of one of the locals, and sets out to tell the human-interest stories of the people who've spent four years living in the wreckage of Manhattan.

The folks over at BoingBoing are drooling all over this series because, they say, it shows the gritty reality of what war is "really like" in an urban war zone by transposing the realities of real urban warfare onto the familiar setting of downtown Manhattan. Their science fiction fannishness is showing, I'm afraid. DMZ falls far, far short of showing you what it would really be like to be living in a major urban area during an all-out civil war. What it shows you is the Mary-Sue fantasy that is so prevalent in science fiction fandom, this fantasy that having society collapse around you wouldn't really be so bad, that smart people like J. Random Truefan could find a way to craft an almost utopian lifestyle. For example, DMZ shows us that the 400,000 residents of Manhattan almost never miss a meal, because of artists' communes who raise soybeans for tofu in rooftop gardens. Not only would that never work in reality, the series completely hand-waves the question of where those 400,000 people are getting their drinking water, let alone the gasoline to run the nearly ubiquitous generators, considering that right now New York City imports its drinking water by pipeline almost all the way from Canada.

I'm all too familiar with this techno-anarchist fantasy. When I was young and dumb, and living during the mind numbing horror that was the Reagan administration, I had my own fantasies about revolution and civil war in America given that we couldn't get someone as obviously corrupt and lawless as Reagan impeached. And it was back then when my older, wiser online friend, back before he let his visceral hatred of John Kerry turn him into a willing shill for every Republican talking point, said something very important to me that smartened me up a lot. ponsdorf told me, 25 years ago when I was having my own fantasies about urban warfare in the US, that, "The problem with revolutions is that the garbage doesn't get picked up, and men with uniforms and guns become inordinately important." Since then I've had my own local reminders of just how horrible urban warfare can be. St. Louis ended up being a major resettlement area for two of the three sides in the Yugoslav civil war, and St. Louis's new Bosnian-American and Serbian-American citizens all have their own horrible stories of what it was like living through the siege of Sarajevo. And trust me when I say, Wood's DMZ doesn't even come close.

If nothing else, he's made the mistake of modeling his Manhattan war zone too closely on Baghdad. People don't realize just how much worse than Baghdad that things could be. Baghdad is still a city into which billions of dollars are flowing, and Baghdad is situated in a country that's self-sufficient on oil and gasoline. But even then, as you see if you get a chance to watch Engel's "War Zone Diary," life in an actual war zone is much more horrible than Wood's fantasy. (And you should see it. It's great. And a major eye-opener, even to someone like me who follows the war news.)

No, the only realistic depiction that I've seen of what a city looks like after all government has withdrawn from it, and it's then been fought over with modern weapons for any span of time, is the concentration camp sequence in Children of Men. That movie meets one of my criteria for "movies I'll probably buy on DVD." To keep myself to within a reasonable budget, a movie has to either be something that I'll want to watch over and over, or something I expect to have a hard time getting ahold of later that I know I'll want to see in the future, or (most likely reason to buy a DVD) because it's something that I want to loan to all my friends until they've all seen it, too. Children of Men is definitely one of those latter movies, one that's very important to me, one that I want everybody I know to have seen. But I'm feeling some weird ambivalence about having a copy of it in my house. If you remember my review of the movie, and more importantly my reaction to it the next day (warning: those links contain spoilers), then you know that watching that movie tore me up inside; up to 48 hours later, I was still intermittently weeping like a baby over it. I don't know how eager I am to put myself through that again, no matter how good and how important a movie it is.

Massively Mary-Sue Online Role Playing Games

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 05:01:29 GMT

By now most of you have probably heard that the first trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End is available online. Seeing it reminded me that there are two massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) racing to cash in on it: Disney's own Pirates of the Caribbean Online and independent software developer Flying Lab's Pirates of the Burning Sea. So it occurred to me to go check up on the progress on both of them, because, after all, what kind of a pirate would I be if I wasn't at least vaguely interested in playing one online?

Sadly, I figure that Pirates of the Burning Sea is doomed. There's no way that they aren't going to be completely out-marketed by Disney. Heck, Disney probably doesn't even care if it theirs makes any money, any more than they really care if every one of the manufactured teen pop starlets they crank out every year makes money on their albums, and for the same reason. They don't need to make money on PotC Online itself as long as it continues to promote the movie, the toys, the videos, any direct-to-video sequels, any TV cartoon spinoffs, and of course the theme park whose ride the movie was itself spun off from, just as even the most money-losing album from any of this year's Disney teen pop stars is still a commercial for her TV series and its merchandise. And Disney has shown a willingness in the past to keep spending money on a money-losing MMO as long as there's any chance that it'll still grow. Look how long they've supported Toontown Online, waiting for it to get to the point where anybody's heard of it? It's taken it almost 4 years to get to the minimum market penetration it has now, but Disney doesn't seem to mind, and Toontown Online isn't even as useful for marketing other Disney properties as PotC Online could be. Worse luck, PotBS's developers have announced that it won't ship before June at the earliest, well after opening weekend for PotC3; Disney's PotC Online is (from the last report I saw) still expected to launch the same weekend as the movie. And we all know, if by nothing else than the overwhelming success of World of Warcraft, how powerful a brand name can be; if it weren't for brand name, crappy games like Star Wars: Galaxies and The Matrix Online would have gone the way of Motor City Online or Earth and Beyond a long time ago.

But one of the other reasons I worry about PotBS's chances is that the very same design feature, design decision, that I most prefer it for, may actually be the real reason that it's doomed: every player character in Pirates of the Burning Sea isn't Lieutenant Mary Sue. For those of you who've never heard of our intrepid heroine Mary Sue, she's a cliché of bad fan fiction, a stand-in for the author who miraculously jumps into the story in the nick of time to save the day (and romance the lead) because she's so much smarter, stronger, faster, wiser, more athletic, and better looking than anybody else in the whole universe, including the entire original cast of the canonical fiction combined. So how can Mary Sue not save the day and be the romantic lead? (The best darned parody of Mary Sue I've seen in a long time is a 7-page Girl Genius filler story called "Fan Fiction." Check it out.)

Anyway, what this has to do with PotBS vs PotC Online is this: Burning Sea's own web page admits that they're struggling to be seen as something other than "Sid Meier's Pirates meets World of Warcraft." And judging by the beta test reports on their web page, it clearly is more than that, including what looks to be the coolest looking combat systems in the history of MMO gaming. (But then, that's what I thought about The Matrix Online's combat system before it shipped, too, so what do I know?) But comparing it to the classic single-player game Pirates! by Sid Meier isn't entirely unfair. Your character in PotBS starts out as a lowly swabby, and you progress level by level until you (at least theoretically) become skilled enough and wealthy enough, if you stick with it and have the organizational skills, to build a pirate fleet capable of conquering every city and settlement in the Caribbean. But it's not likely. Most likely even with infinite luck, patience, and skill you'll end up one of a couple of dozen of the most powerful pirate fleet captains in the game, and very few people will even make it that far. The experience that they're selling isn't the experience of being the most famous, most deadly, most wealthy, most powerful pirate in the history of the world, but the experience of being there and having your own story to tell, your own part to play, in the decisive pirate-versus-navy and pirate-versus-pirate battles of the early 18th century.

On the other hand, as best as I can tell from their description of the game systems on the Pirates of the Caribbean Online's web page, in PotC Online you start out almost as powerful as Captain Jack Sparrow. You're the most famous pirate in the Caribbean, everybody knows your name, and you start out (or very nearly start out) with a magical ship of your own and a voodoo talisman that can summon it to you, sailing on a cloud of mist, from anywhere in the Caribbean. From the looks of it, they're following the same design principles that Sony dictated for the redesign of Star Wars: Galaxies. When SWG first shipped, you were a citizen of the Empire swept up in the Civil War, between episode 3 and 4, someone with his own story to tell of what you did in the years after the fall of the Old Republic. After Sony got done with it, you started out as (I kid you not) Han Solo's best friend from childhood. He's there to greet you when you start the tutorial, and like every other Star Wars character you've ever seen on the screen, pathetically greatful that a real hero like you is there to save his bacon. Presumably Jack Sparrow and Elizabeth Swan and the rest will respond to your player character in PotC Online the same way -- to you and to everybody else.

Look, I don't mind playing Mary Sue in a single-player game. Then it even makes some sense. But a MMORPG is considered a failure if any given server, any given copy of the game universe, has fewer than 500 people playing at any given time. If all 500 of you started out as powerful and as famous and as heroic as the main characters of the story, doesn't that cheapen things an awful lot? Doesn't that completely break your ability to imagine that the world you're playing in is real, or even interesting, at all dramatic? I know that it does me. But Disney is betting that there are tens or even hundreds of thousands of people out there who, when they imagine themselves as a pirate in the Caribbean, imagine themselves as the person who bravely rescues the heroes because they're even cooler than Jack Sparrow, even handier with a sword than Will Turner, even braver and better looking that Elizabeth Swan, and even more magical than Tia Dalma, and the game just won't be any fun to them unless Jack and Will and Elizabeth and Tia show up in person to tell them so. And I'm not prepared to bet that Disney is wrong to think so.

View Poll: PotC Online or PotBS?

(Correction: I forgot, Puzzle Pirates isn't free, only free to try. My bad. It's cheap, though.)

Better Than It Has Any Right to Be: The Host

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 06:28:41 GMT

The Tivoli sent me two free preview passes for a South Korean monster movie, so far the highest grossing South Korean movie ever made, The Host. Monster movies aren't my kind of thing, really. Nor, honestly, did this one seem to have a whole lot going for it that couldn't be said of the endless parade of cheap-o monster movies that the Sci Fi channel craps out to the tune of a dozen or two dozen per year, that you can see for free at home any weekend. But, hey, free science fiction movie on the big screen, and I had nothing better to do. And phierma is much more of a fan of Asian monster movies than I am, so I offered the other pass to him. And the hard thing for me to describe is that I really did enjoy it, that it really is head and shoulders above the rest of the genre of "mutated monster runs amok" movies, but after hours of analysis I still can't really put my finger on why.

Minimal-spoiler capsule summary: A bus-sized mutated amphibious carnivorous river dolphin comes up out of the Han River in central Seoul and starts munching on picnickers. About 200 Koreans are killed, including many young children, and one American soldier on leave who tries to fight the thing gets badly injured. In one of those telling details that the movie gets right, even the South Korean TV news headlines the wounded American soldier without even getting around to mentioning the hundreds of Korean casualties in the lead story. But the soldier's injury turns into world news when he survives the fight with the monster only to die, hours later, of a fast-spreading virus that he seems to have contracted just from touching the creature's skin. So the Korean government rapidly quarantines everybody they can find that got anywhere near the creature during its rampage, with special attention on the local guy who fought the monster alongside that American soldier and who admits to having gotten some of its blood on him, the mildly retarded father of one of the little girls who was eaten. But while he's in quarantine, he gets a cellphone call from his "dead" daughter, telling him that the monster carried some of its prey back to its nest alive, to be eaten later. Nobody believes him; he was brain damaged even before he was exposed to a virus, so he clearly hallucinated it.

The Korean government voluntarily steps aside to turn the whole problem over to the US Army's biowarfare department (with some help from an improbably clueless CDC), who are just itching to test out a counter-terrorism weapon they developed to wipe out fast-spreading viruses. Their goal is to quarantine those who might be infected for study, then dose a mile-wide stretch of the Han River with an experimental gas that should kill every virus in the area, thereby disinfecting the monster. At that point, presumably, actually killing the monster becomes a local problem. So it falls to that little girl's family, a group whose competence and interpersonal skills rival those of the Simpsons, to break out of the government hospital, use the one clue they got from the little girl before her cellphone died to find her, and then somehow kill the monster and rescue her ... with three black-market shotguns and a competition bow with target arrows.

The acting is, well, a little clumsy by my standards; the characters are way, way over-played, almost cartoonish, acted without a hint of subtlety. And the background music rather resembles a high school orchestra sawing away at their instruments with great enthusiasm and only the slightest modicum of skill. But the creature design is extraordinarily well done, well done enough that the director felt no fear of failure in showing the thing in broad daylight including closeups. The monster's initial attack is a work of cinematic beauty, one very long almost unbroken take as literally hundreds of people try to find anywhere the monster can't get to them, while the monster swoops among them like a shark on land, including some probably intentional moments of bleak comedy about just how random survival can be when things go completely inverted. But I think the biggest thing that this movie has going for it is that for a monster movie, it's an extraordinarily thoughtful script. Most monster-of-the-week movies try for social relevance by connecting the emergence of the monster, or its ability to survive, to some current social issue or some bit of important history. This movie ties it to dozens of important incidents from a decade's worth of such history spanning three continents, and does most of it extraordinarily well.

One important warning: if seeing America cast in a bad light makes your skin itch, skip The Host. It's not worth getting worked up and aggravated over an imported monster movie that nobody will remember three months or at most six months from now. Because America does come off badly in this, as a lot of (American) reviewers have complained about. It's the racism and arrogance of an American doctor, eager to humiliate a Korean subordinate, that creates the monster in the first place. The CDC are also shown as total bumblers, and the US Army in this is way too eager to sweep aside local authorities, brings in corrupt American defense contractors, and is completely callous of whatever the human costs to the host country of their plan of action will be. But, and here's one of the things that I think almost every western reviewer I read missed, it's not any kinder to the South Korean government or to the South Korean people, most of whom come across as some combination of incompetent, corrupt, and/or eager to turn everything over to the Americans to take care of. The movie also doesn't flinch away from some ugly incidents in South Korean political history, and shows that much of what's wrong with the way people in the movie react to each other and to the monster is because of wounds inflicted by that history.

But it's also one heck of an action romp that has not unfairly or unreasonably been compared to Spielberg's original Jaws. If you like monster movies, period, whether or not you should go see this movie is a no-brainer. Of course you should, and don't bother trying to think about it too much, just enjoy it as an action flick with a cool monster. If you like really thoughtful science fiction movies, you should see this, but manage your expectations; parts of it don't bear thinking about too much. If, however, as I've already said, you're an American (or a South Korean) and really sensitive to insults, if you really don't want to be insulted by your sci-fi monster movies, skip this one. Oh, and I should also mention because I know it's a turn-off for some people, it's in Korean with really mediocre subtitles.

Doing Unto Michael Moore as Michael More Does Unto Others

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 05:02:56 GMT

I see on the AP wire tonight that somebody just did a Michael Moore style documentary -- about Michael Moore. And even though he's supposedly on my side, my reaction is, "It's about f--king time." (Christy Lemire, "Film questions Michael Moore's tactics," AP, 3/11/07) They've even got a great title for the movie, a Noam Chomsky in-joke, Manufacturing Dissent.

Here's my take on Michael Moore. I loved his first movie, Roger and Me. I thought at the time that some of it was a little unfair. I didn't find out until this article what apparently many people already knew, namely just how unfair it was: contrary to what he says in that move, GM CEO Roger Smith did in fact meet with Michael Moore, did give him his interview, and then gave him yet another interview at the shareholder's meeting. In other words, the whole main narrative hook for that movie, the ambush interview suspect running away in full cowardly flight, turns out to be a fraud. I wish I was more surprised than I am by that. I also loved his movie Bowling for Columbine ... right up until the last, what, 15 or 20 minutes or so where it got nasty, personal, and entirely unfair. And some of you may remember my reviews of Farenheit 9/11, both the film and the DVD, where I said that it was a movie with two really, really powerful scenes that are completely swallowed up by and buried in a ton of poorly sourced, ill thought out, and frequently unfair muck. In the former review, I agreeingly quoted one of his critics as saying that the Michael Moore school of documentary film-making is to throw as much mud as possible at the target and hope that some of it sticks.

When I go looking for a fair comparison, basically I think that Michael Moore is the Michael Savage of the left. He's very earnest, but not terribly bright. He's prone to conspiracy theory and name-calling and demonization of people who disagree with him. He seldom seems to know what he's talking about, and only in one sequence in Bowling for Columbine has he ever shown any hint that he has any ability to think through the consequences of what he's saying, or to look beyond stale dogma for explanations for why something happened. In other words, I think he shares enough of the traits that sane people criticize right wing shock jocks like Michael Savage for to fairly compare the two of them. He's not the Ann Coulter of the left, he's not that embarrassing, but he's embarrassing enough that I'm less than totally happy to have him be one of the highly visible spokespeople for my side on anything.

So if Manufacturing Dissent makes it to St. Louis, I'll very probably want to go see it.