Film Week

A review of the films I've seen this past week.

SMOTHER (2007)
My guess is that this movie just wasn't good enough to make it to theaters, so it premiered on Lifetime. That's the only explanation I'll allow for a movie with my darling Liv Tyler premiering on Lifetime. Rather a lot more masturbation jokes than you see in Lifetime movies, too. Anyway, hunk of wood Dax Shepard is as weirdly hostile as always, married to Liv Tyler, recently fired from his job, and has to contend with an overbearing mother (Diane Keaton in her umpteenth batty, overbearing mother role, which is getting extremely fucking old). A lot of the guy's relationship with his mom is, let's face it, way too familiar for me to find funny. I'm going with ** stars; one for beautiful Liv, and the other for Mike White, who has an all-too-small role as a struggling screenwriter who, I think, speaks for harrassed bloggers everywhere when he says "I'm sorry if you think what I write about is stupid, but I don't know how to change what makes me happy."

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII (1933)
Well, Charles Laughton is excellent in as King Henry VIII, boisterous and dangerous, childish and capricious, but the movie has room for improvement. It's a sort of by-the-numbers biopic that doesn't have much to say about the man himself, but is held together by Laughton's performance. I also love Robert Donat, and Elsa Lanchester is funny as Anne of Cleves. It's a good movie and little more, but that's enough. *** stars.

THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK (1939)
Somewhat overlong version of the Dumas novel directed by James Whale. There's a lot of good stuff in here--the swordfighting is great, it's funny in the right places, most of the actors are very good--it just goes on a bit too long before getting to the climax and doesn't grab the audience as well as it should for such an adventure. And the Musketeers get short shrift, I think; I had to check the credits to see which actor played which Musketeer. (Master scene-stealer Alan Hale is great as Athos; unfortunately, according to the credits, he's playing Porthos). But there's a lot more to recommend than there is to detract. Louis Hayward is great as the petulant, almost sadistic King Louis XIV and his secret twin brother, the daring, dashing Philippe of Gascony. Warren William, always so stagey, is pretty good as D'Artagnan, Joseph Schildkraut is foppish and cunning as Fouquet, Walter Kingsford is a stolid Colbert, and Joan Bennett is pretty (there's not much call for more) as Princess Maria Theresa. It's a fun time, ***1/2 stars. Much better than that Leonardo Di Caprio movie.

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (2008)
Pitch fucking perfect. One of my favorite movies ever. I'm not sure I have a deeper opinion of it than that, but it is fucking perfection. **** stars. And James Franco is the best he's ever been; so great to see him and Seth Rogen together again.

Ron Asheton 1948-2009

Gonna listen to some Stooges today.

I Don't Have to Be Perfect

Beginning of the day.

TEACHER: So, we're going to put you in where we would normally have someone who translates for our Spanish-speaking students. We have about 16 in the program. I don't suppose you speak Spanish?

ME: No, sorry. I didn't realize you needed someone who was bilingual.

TEACHER: No, that's okay, we can still use you. Most of the kids are pretty fluent.

ME: I wish they'd put that on the job description. Whenever I get a room full of Spanish-speaking kids I feel like I'm not helping.

TEACHER: Unfortunately, if we put it in the job description, no one takes it.

ME: But then you end up with someone like me, who can't speak Spanish.

TEACHER: Well, you don't have to be perfect.

End of the day.

STUDENT: Are you going to be here tomorrow?

ME: Yes.

STUDENT: Are you going to be the regular assistant now?

ME: No, she'll be back on Friday. I'm just here today and tomorrow.

STUDENT: Oh, that's too bad.

ME: Is it?

STUDENT: Yeah, I don't like the regular assistant. None of us do.

ME: I'm sorry to hear that.

STUDENT: All she does is talk about how she went to college. That, or her fiance. And she, like, yells at us a lot and doesn't help us. I think she hates kids.

ME: Wow.

STUDENT: Yeah, you should be the new regular assistant.

ME: Unfortunately, I don't speak Spanish, so they'd never let me, anyway.

STUDENT: But you're laid back and cool. We like you.

ME: I like you guys, too, but I still don't speak Spanish.

STUDENT: So? You don't have to be perfect.

The Health Report, Year 3: Week 4

I came across this online. Just seemed like a good idea to keep in mind that this is what I feel like whenever I eat fast food. Gots to work harder.

TV Report: Batman and Batman

Three's Company isn't the only old rerun I've been reevaluating lately. For the past couple of months, I've been watching Batman on Saturday mornings on a local rerun channel.

I'm talking about this guy, of course.

1966 Adam West model.

Is Batman still a love-it-or-hate-it show? It seems to come and go in cycles. I used to love it as a child; right up until the Tim Burton movie came out in 1989, actually. The great thing about Batman is that he's been interpreted so many ways that you don't have to feel compelled to love everything. You can love whatever most fits your personal interpretation of the character. But, of course, as a surly teenager, I loved the dark Batman, and the excellent Batman: The Animated Series which followed soon after. I had little patience for what seemed like a parody version of Batman, and so Adam West's delivery and the silly, labeled gadgets became objects of derision and scorn for me. Camp? Not for me!

Now, decades later, I've suddenly found myself liking the show again. Not just liking it, but loving it. I mean, yes, let's just get this out of the way now: it's a really stupid show. I mean, there's camp, and then there's dumb. And some of this show is just amazingly dumb. Seriously, I saw an episode where the Penguin got a film permit from Gotham City and then set up a fake bank robbery just to antagonize Batman. Seriously, anyone can do anything in Gotham City, it seems; convicted felons can get whatever they want just by asking for it. Even, apparently, if they have an alias.

(Incidentally, I also think it's pretty funny that Batman and Robin mentioned on the first episode that they were deputized by the Gotham Police Department, which means that the city is liable for anything they do and anyone they may rough up in the course of their crimefighting. That makes me laugh, but it also kind of delights me. The naivete is charming.)

But I get the show now. It's the style. Adam West's delivery is a stylistic choice; Batman is a boy scout. Things are labeled "Bat Computer" or "Entrance to Hidden Lair" for the benefit of the audience (and as a nod to editorial labels in comics). I get the way the humor is pitched. And boy, do I love the villains. Cesar Romero, Frank Gorshin, Julie Newmar, Vincent Price, Burgess Meredith, George Sanders, Milton Berle, Cliff Robertson, Victor Buono--oh, gods, do I love Victor Buono as King Tut! He's doing Shakespeare to the rafters! Cesar Romero is chewing the scenery down to the bolts! It's frigging wonderful! The villains are just a delight nine and a half times out of ten.

Honestly, the tone of the show almost makes it criticism-proof. It's aimed at kids, and a certain type of adult appreciates the humor and the audacious silliness of it all. Half of the fun comes from how unbelievably stupid and stupidly unbelievable it is. And I don't mean that in a condescending way at all; it's delightful. I love watching Batman.

(And yes, some of this has to do with my adverse reaction to The Dark Knight, which I think carried the symbolism, the psychology, and the psychotic violence so far over the top that it became over-serious and dull. Having a Batman I can enjoy on a light level is a dream after that. But trust me, this is a good show precisely because it doesn't take anything seriously and is so imperfect.)

I've also been watching Batman: The Brave and the Bold on Cartoon Network. I wasn't planning on watching this show, actually, but I just flipped onto it one night and fell in love. The second I saw Batman in his blue and grey costume, climbing up the sides of buildings and flying into outer space, I knew this was the Batman cartoon for me. It's very much in the vein of the Adam West series and the campier comics of the 1960s. But, at the same time, it takes the character seriously.

It's also a fanboy dream, by the way. Half of the fun for me is seeing which version of which character they're going to use; for instance, they use the new Blue Beetle but they also use the Golden and Silver Age version of Green Arrow. There's an episode with Aquaman that offers a characterization I've never seen before: he's pompous, in love with himself, and constantly repeats his exploits to show how adventurous he is. It's hilarious.

Let's just describe the show this way: on the second episode, which is wonderfully titled "Terror on Dinosaur Island," Batman and Plastic Man face Gorilla Grodd and an army of gorillas on a jungle island full of dinosaurs. They ride the dinosaurs. And they want to turn the human race into a race of intelligent gorillas. If the sight of Batman and Plastic Man fighting superintelligent gorillas holding laser rifles on flying pterosaurs doesn't instantly warm your heart... well, I don't know what to tell you except that I'm sorry about your capacity for joy, robot.

Overreaction to the New Doctor

So, we're going to play this game now.

I check out a lot of film/TV/geek sites every day on my Google Reader, and I was a bit surprised by the overreaction of a number of those sites to the casting of Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor. Granted, I'm simply not enthused by the choice. But that's simply because I don't know Matt Smith's work and I feel a bit annoyed that they cast someone so young. (And the youth thing is simply part of a larger annoyance I have with most of pop culture, where everyone seems to be a child these days--this was my same reaction to casting people too young to have a child as parents Superman and Lois Lane in Superman Returns; Superman is thirty, it's okay if he's an adult.) Still, as I said in the linked post, I trust Stephen Moffat's judgment and his creative abilities, so I'll wait and see what Smith does with the role. I have misgivings, sure, but I'll be happy to have them dispelled. Wait and see and hope for the best.

A number of the sites I read have said more or less the same thing. What surprised me was the way some sites have gone wild over the actor chosen as "another white male." Apparently, because so much of the fan rumor over the new Doctor involved Paterson Joseph or Chiwetel Ejiofor, it's somehow, according to a lot of writers today, an either unconscious or conscious bit of racism on the part of the BBC to cast "yet another" white guy as the Doctor. Apparently this has something to do with Barack Obama being elected president; now that we've got our first black president, we're supposed to have a black Doctor, or else we're all somehow racists. I'm not sure how or why it works that way, but all of a sudden Doctor Who, one of the more innovative and progressive-thinking science fiction series on television, is being painted as behind the times and medieval in its thinking simply because the Doctor isn't black.

Or a woman! That's been sparking even more heated commentary in chatrooms today. I simply can't read it because it's too annoying. Would it be interesting to see a woman play the Doctor? Yes, of course it would. Catherine Tate gave us a taste of that on the finale to series four, and it was pretty wonderful. I'd love to see an actress like Rachel Weisz or Gina Bellman or Emma Thompson play the Doctor. What I don't understand is the men who are extremely, utterly resistant to this idea, who get in chatrooms and write long, unreadable explanations as to why the Doctor can never, ever be a woman. I mean, the Doctor can be anyone, right? That's the beauty of the Doctor. The writers figured out a long time ago how to avoid precisely what makes DC Comics so dull and Marvel Comics so desperate: the Doctor can go on and on forever because the Doctor can literally be anyone. It doesn't have to be the same person over and over and they don't have to pull more and more desperate gimmicks out of their hats to make him appear to be the same person over and over.

Anyway, Matt Smith may not be my choice, but I'm not a producer on Doctor Who, am I? I've always wanted it to be Patrick Stewart, myself, but we all have our choices. Robson Green, or Jack Davenport, or James Nesbitt, or Bill Nighy, or Colin Salmon. Paterson Joseph would have been an interesting choice; he's an interesting actor. And maybe Matt Smith is a little underwhelming because we've been teased for a while with Paterson Joseph and the possibility of David Morrissey (who would've been a marvelous choice). But, as John pointed out in the comments of my previous Doctor Who post, "It's the burden of a Who fan to watch and wait and accept [. . .] Everyone has their favorite and their least favorite, but it's never destroyed the show."

So my question for the dissenters who have gotten into a snit over the race of the actor playing the Doctor who have asked "Why does the Doctor have to be a white guy?" is: "Why does the Doctor have to not be a white guy?"

Animal Man

When I was a little kid, my dad used to take me to a barber shop to get my hair cut. I always loved going there; I loved the smell of the place, the feel of the leather chairs, and the way the barbers would always treat me like I was older than I really was. They had a little stand there filled with magazines; Playboy on the top shelf, Time and Newsweek and National Geographic on the middle shelf, and comic books on the bottom shelf. I remember that they pretty much always had DC Comics and Disney Comics.

Being between the ages of six and eleven, I knew perfectly well who the DC characters were. I was still watching Super Friends, which spawned one of the coolest action figure series in history (my friend Jason had many of them, and they were awesome), and I loved Adam West as Batman and Christopher Reeve as Superman and Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. But I could never get into the comic books themselves. I always thought they were boring when I was a kid, and it took me a long time to figure out why.

The writers who came into DC Comics in the mid-seventies were fans of the comics who grew up with these characters, and decided it was their duty to "fix" what they saw as continuity errors. It was this kind of obsessive thinking that led to the Crisis on Infinite Earths, and it was this kind of thinking that continues to ruin DC Comics. This was the era of DC Comics from my childhood, and I could never get into it. I was into Marvel Comics instead, which were written more for children to enjoy than aimed directly at longtime fans.

I think, too, that there was too much of a self-conscious press to make comic books for adults in the eighties, especially at DC. Post-Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, a lot of the writers were going into purposely dark, violent territory in an attempt to get adults to take comics "seriously," which I think is a pretty immature attitude. It reminds me of when anime got extremely popular in America in the nineties, and people kept telling me it was so much better than American animation because of the sex and the violence, as though their mere utilization was automatically a sign of maturity. Far from it. Having something mature to say is a sign of maturity. And in the late eighties, when comic book heroes became murderous psychopaths, immaturity was in full swing. Hell, even Marvel got into it by deciding that crazed sociopath the Punisher was a hero.

The problem was, for every Alan Moore or Frank Miller or Neil Gaiman who had a story to tell and something to say about the form, there were hacks who just kept trying to push the envelope for the sake of pushing the envelope and didn't really have anything to say at all. Which is why I didn't really get heavily into DC Comics until I was 17 (with some exceptions; I'd read whatever Frank Miller work there was to find, plus Watchmen, and was regularly glued to the Keith Giffen-J.M. DeMatteis-Kevin Maguire Justice League).

So back at the barbershop, I opted for Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck instead. And I'd still opt for them over a lot of what DC put out in the eighties.

For instance, Animal Man.

After years of being told it was something I needed to read, I sat down with Grant Morrison's Animal Man. And I tried really hard to get through the whole thing. But eventually the stupidity became overwhelming and I opted not to read the second and third collections. All it did was remind me of everything that made DC Comics so stupid in the eighties: the New Wave fashions, the girls in skimpy clothes almost getting raped around every corner, the misery and sadness on full display, the constant angst for the sake of constant angst, the constant questioning of altruistic impulses. It was like a whole exercise in "Let's just see what I can get away with." I don't have time for this. I don't have time for Grant Morrison, really; with the exception of some of his works (I cherish All-Star Superman), I see him as a negative force in DC Comics as it happens, anyway.

And my god, Animal Man is just really, really stupid.

Best Supporting Actress 2008: Amy Adams, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

My contribution to StinkyLulu's 3rd Annual Supporting Actress Blogathon.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day was easily overlooked and dismissed when it came out back in March. It's that time of the year when no one's really paying attention, and it seems, on its surface (and, really, for at least the first half of the movie) to be little more than a charming period comedy with decent writing. It's an easy-breezy movie that feels a lot like a farce that doesn't quite have the energy.

But I think the movie elevates itself above that, especially in its surprisingly serious third act; the characters are written and acted with some dimension to them. Frances McDormand, Ciaran Hinds, and Lee Pace play their roles with commitment, making them real people inside this sort of sea of forced frivolity going on around them.

But my favorite is Amy Adams.

Adams plays Delysia Lafosse, a club singer and wannabe star. She's one of those characters you're always seeing described as "wide-eyed" and "bubbly," and she certainly is those things (and she lights up every room she's in with her whole, well, wide-eyed and bubbly act). But Adams brings a measured balance to Delysia. There's a gravity to this character that describes the entire thrust of the movie. Which goes back to the sea of forced frivolity I mentioned.

This is 1930s London, a time of blackouts and bombing raids. All around the edges of this movie is this sense of urgency, as though the serious concerns of the outside world are going to smash and destroy the temporal concerns of the characters. Delysia can only see her quest for fame, and is willing to become a gangster's plaything to get there. She's running from what she sees as a rather mundane, ordinary upbringing and from the seriousness of her relationship with Lee Pace (which is, of course, inescapably true love, which may interfere with her stardom). Her selfish concerns have taken on an overriding personal importance because of the lead-up to war in Europe. She needs to seize her moment before the moment disappears in a hail of bombs. All of London society feels the same press, and their frivolities have become much more forced and important as a result. And so Delysia plays the game even harder than she otherwise might, because she's caught in the same press.

The message, of course, is that such concerns really are frivolities, and people will find what is really important when the press becomes too much. Adams mirrors this with a gravity that exists just behind Delysia's exterior mirth and carelessness. The decision to give up on love in order to chase stardom wears on her, as society's decision to ignore the outside world in favor of parties and fashion wears on them. Adams lets the cracks start to widen until her big moment, when she sings "If I Didn't Care" before a nightclub and is forced to deal with the reality that, of course, she does care. Tremendously. It's a moment of bittersweet emotion, a moment when Delysia bares her heart. Ironically, it's while doing the thing she has made herself an artifice to get to: commanding attention on the stage. It's a song that asks the listener to believe in its conviction, and its the moment when Delysia finds hers.

Amy Adams was dismissed for overacting in this movie, but it's actually quite a calculated feat what she does. She plays a character who needs to appear light and charming, even ditzy and obtainable, but who is secretly very weary and desperate and pulled in two directions at once. I think she achieves a great balance between comic and dramatic without going over the top. And her voice is lovely. I've been pulling for Amy Adams to win an Oscar for about three or four years now. This is the third performance of hers I've seen that reaches Oscar-worthy heights.

Song of the Week: "Antmusic"

Adam and the Ants want you to ignore disco and dig their sound. I always did. I just happened to think of this song today; always a favorite. From the 1980 debut album, Kings of the Wild Frontier. The sound on this is not optimal.

Giant Cuttle Fish

Sunday Hottie 205

ESTHER BAXTER

What Is a Matt Smith?

Okay, so the new Doctor is going to be a 26 year-old creepy-lookin' guy. Great. Awesome. What an underwhelming, anticlimactic choice. Why do they keep getting younger and younger? At this rate we'll have a teenager as the Doctor before 2012.

That said, I trust Stephen Moffat. I'll wait to see him in action. I'm not so excited anymore, but I'll wait and see.

Saturday Playlist

1. Nellie McKay: The Big One
2. Brak: I’m Forgettable/News Bulletin/I’m a Cucumber/News Bulletin
3. Patti Smith: Paths That Cross
4. Generation X: Your Generation
5. Danny Elfman: The Quadruped Patrol
6. Strawberry Switchblade: Since Yesterday
7. Captain Groovy and His Bubblegum Army: Captain Groovy and His Bubblegum Army
8. Queen: Nevermore
9. Ludwig Van Beethoven: Piano Sonata Concerto No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13 “Pathetique,” 2nd Movement
10. The Cure: Let’s Go to Bed

1. From Nellie's second album Pretty Little Head. Strong opener for a randomly selected Saturday Playlist.
2. From one of my favorite albums, Brak Presents The Brak Album Starring Brak, which is the soundtrack to Brak Presents The Brak Show Starring Brak. The special, not the series. Didn't care much for the series, but the special is hilarious. "I'm Forgettable" is one I think is especially funny, containing the line "Do you remember our last dance; I never wanted to change pants... with you."
3. Pretty, pretty, pretty song.
4. One of two tracks I have by this band; I like "Ready Steady Go" better.
5. The fourth movement from Elfman's Serenada Schizophrana, which is the soundtrack to an IMAX movie about deep sea exploration.
6. I don't really need to hear this one too often. It's alright. Pretty opening.
7. Apparently this 1969 psychedelic single was meant to be the theme song to a cartoon that never materialized. I have it from a compilation of bubblegum rock. Groovy, but impossibly stupid.
8. One of my favorite tracks from the gorgeous Queen II.
9. Not my favorite Beethoven piece. Billy Joel did a song that uses some of this music, and now it's all I can hear.
10. A classic and a nice one to go out on.

TV Report: Three's Company

Sometimes I act on weird impulses. One recent impulse I had was to check out TV Land and similar channels which just show old reruns and record as many Christmas episodes of old shows that I could stand watching. We got a nice mix, some good (Sanford and Son, Good Times) and some bad (was Bewitched always that boring?), and generally enjoyed ourselves.

Somehow, this led to me noticing that TV Land had rounded the horn on reruns and their Three's Company airing schedule was about to hit the first episode. They show it here at one in the morning, and it generally airs until three. So, for the hell of it, for some odd reason, I started TiVoing Three's Company. Maybe I just felt the need to take another look at it.

I was born the year before Three's Company started its initial run, so the thing was in syndication by the time I was, I don't know, seven or eight. I used to watch it, and a lot of other shows, on my local WFLD 32 Chicago, which became the FOX affiliate in 1989. It was the same channel where I used to watch, for example, M*A*S*H, Happy Days, and a bunch of other shows that I used to think of as really old, despite the fact that they all went off the air in the early eighties. I liked Three's Company, especially John Ritter as Jack Tripper, because he always made me laugh. I never really got the jokes about his character pretending to be gay; I mean, I sort of new what gay was (I grew up in the suburbs in the eighties, it was considered impolite to talk about it in front of kids, or something), but I didn't get that it meant you didn't like girls. Hey, give me a break, I was a child.

As I got older, Three's Company sort of became a term I used with friends for really bad, obvious television based on misunderstandings. I remember about the time Friends starting getting mega-popular; I hated that show and I hated that it was being called innovative when all of the humor was merely an update of old sitcom tropes. I specifically recall having a conversation while working at Barnes & Noble with Carl about how bad modern sitcoms had gotten, and him saying "I think every young sitcom writer now has a book on his desk. It's called The Guide to Writing a Modern Sitcom. They open it up and it's just the script for every episode of Three's Company with the names blanked out."

Anyway, for some reason, Three's Company started loading on my TiVo. So Becca and I have been watching it, and we're closing in on the end of the second season (the first was only six episodes). And I have to say, I'm surprised by how much I'm enjoying it.

Yes, it's familiar. Not only because I saw it as a kid (and I'm surprised what I remember and what I don't remember), but because it's been so heavily ripped-off by other shows ever since. But it's a comfortable kind of familiar, not an irritating one.

A lot of this has to do with the actors. I think it might not have worked with any other three actors in the leads (which is probably why I don't remember the Jennilee Harrison or Priscilla Barnes episodes as fondly).

Joyce DeWitt is underrated as Janet Wood, I think. In the first season, she has this pretty straight hair. I don't know why they opted to go curly in the second season; it's not as cute. They try too hard to make her the less attractive one, when the fact is she's got a nice body and is very pretty; they give her these dowdy clothes sometimes... granted, it's the late seventies, so pretty much all of the clothes are terrible (oy, my early childhood in those clashing colors), but they really make her down. As a comic actress, though, she holds the center of that show a lot more than anyone else, and without her, I think the entire season would be drowning in a sea of personalities. Jack and Chrissy are the extremes.

Suzanne Somers as Chrissy Snow is a lot better than I remember her. Given everything she's done since, I expected to find her easy to dismiss, but she's quite good. She manages to not become a stereotype of bubbly blond, and her comic timing is pretty good (though not great). And my God, I'd forgotten just how cute she really was on that show. Just so perfectly cute. And funny.

John Ritter as Jack Tripper is giving one of the greatest sitcom performances of all time. He's been praised in the past for his physical comedy, and he's quite gifted in that department. I don't know very much about what John Ritter's approach to comedy was, but he knows when to go broad, when to react, and when to dial it down, and he's really good. He's a likable guy playing a likable guy and, I feel, approaching it seriously but not preciously.

The group dynamic is fantastic, and the show gets a lot of mileage out of simply letting the three of them interact with one another. Take away the misunderstandings and situations, and it still wouldn't be a bad program. I think the leads could pull it off.

As for the sides, I don't think any of the characters are very interesting, but it doesn't really matter. Jack, Janet and Chrissy have enough charisma between the three of them. A big exception, though, is Norman Fell as Mr. Roper. Gosh, he's funny. I tend to like his type of character, the older guy, out of touch with the modern world, grumpy but funny. Fell is terrific, and I'm not looking forward to his leaving the show. Not only am I not a Don Knotts fan, but I just don't remember the show being as much fun without Fell. I guess we'll test that after a bit. Fell is fantastic; my favorite episode so far has been "Strange Bedfellows," the episode where Roper and Jack wind up in bed together. The second half of the episode is a mini-farce that somehow comes off completely. The humor is at the kind of high energy that I think sitcoms can only dream about nowadays.

Anyway, I know that's not too terribly interesting for a TV Report. But I have reassesed my opinion of Three's Company. The first two seasons, anyway, are just terrific.

You Need a Logic Crumple Zone to Understand the New Star Trek Movie

This is a little old, but I just came across this ridiculous interview with hack writer Roberto Orci in which he talks about how the new Star Trek movie is tied in with the Trek canon. He talks about the use of time travel as a plot device--a device which lazy film and television writers have been using as a magical "fix everything" button lately--and says "It is the reason why some things are different, but not everything is different. Not everything is inconsistent with what might have actually happened, in canon. Some of the things that seem that they are totally different, I will argue, once the film comes out, fall well within what could have been the non-time travel version of this movie... [Whether or not fans believe these are "different" versions of the familiar characters] depends on whether or not you believe in nature or nurture and how much you believe in, for lack of a better word, their souls. I would argue that for the characters, their true nature does not change. Our motto for this movie was ’same ship, different day.’"

Jebus Q. Kazoo, are you kidding me? Are we really having this discussion now? Nature or nurture? Whadda wha? This is like one of those logical contradictions that Captain Kirk used to lay on evil computers to get them to blow themselves up.

Let me translate here: the fact is, there are so many people out there who have made the fake Star Trek world their real world, and Paramount wants (more of) their money, so instead of alienating them, they're going to skirt around the idea of creativity by claiming that this all ties in somehow to the regular, established, extremely dull, unending Star Trek universe that book after book has been written about. Don't worry, guys! Everything is different but the same!

Seriously, I know that fanboys worry about canon, and that in fanboy-speak canon is defined as "everything the same as everything else," but this is just going overboard. This is proof that either fanboys are married much more to continuity than to the characters, or Paramount admitting that they think that's the case. Or both, really.

I'd have a lot more respect for the people behind this movie if they just came out and said "We're reimagining Star Trek" or "We're remaking Star Trek." An in addition, of course, "If you aren't interested, don't freaking go." But no, we get this half-assed non-explanation of "No, it's okay, it's still connected! It's the same thing, but different, but reassuringly the same!"

Wasn't Battlestar Galactica a hit in large part because it ignored everything about the original series except for the concepts? How afraid of fans are studios going to continue to be?

Eleventh Doctor Announced Tomorrow

The BBC is apparently going to announce David Tennant's replacement tomorrow on Doctor Who Confidential. I'll be interested to see who it is, but the real test is seeing the first episode. I didn't like David Tennant at first, but now I love him as the Doctor. So we'll see.

Took Me a Minute to See It, But Then I Laughed My Ass Off

Heartbreak

Does a Throwdown Even Matter?

Everything I had to talk about this week seems pretty trivial next to the way Israel decided to celebrate Hanukkah this year: by murdering more Arabs. I had a Throwdown planned for today, but I just can't watch the events in Gaza continue to unfold and give a damn about anything else.

I can't even talk about this, frankly. I don't want to. I'm sick of Israel. I'm fucking sick of their shit. I'm sick of seeing them, throughout their short modern history, pushing and pushing and pushing and breaking truces and ceasefires and doing everything they can to antagonize Palestinians into open warfare so they can claim they didn't do anything to start the conflict anew (except antagonize and provoke; this time it was the tunnel raid two months ago). I'm sick of America taking Israel's side and acting like this conflict is somehow ideological. It's not ideological. It's oppression. It's bullying.

Israel is oppressing Palestinians. And Israel will stop at nothing but the complete extermination of every Palestinian and the powerlessness of the Arab states. Because they won't feel "safe" otherwise.

And, of course, America goes on TV and tells Palestine to get in line and that they are somehow holding up any kind of peace talks. Israel doesn't want peace talks. They want the Palestinians to not exist. That's why they keep starting wars. And we keep backing them up when, frankly, I'm still not sure we should even be involved.

Am I suggesting the Palestinians are blameless? Of course not. That's a stupid argument. But Israel can't claim to be combating Palestinian terrorists when it's bombing Palestine's government buildings. I'm saying what I always say: if Israel is an important ally because "it's the only democracy in a part of the world that has none," than Israel needs to do better. Just being a democracy doesn't make you great. Or faultless. It doesn't here, and it doesn't there.

And before you comment in self-righteous anger (because I get many of those when this topic jumps up), I really don't feel like being called an anti-Semite today. Being against wholesale slaughter is not being pro-Palestinian or anti-Semitic. It's being a human being.

Holy Socks, I Love This Game!

Becca bought this with a Target gift card my dad gave her for Christmas, and we spent all day and most of the night yesterday playing this game. It's so much damn fun! I think the last time I really enjoyed a game this much I was five and rocking Pac-Man and Space Invaders at the arcade.

Oh, Fuck... Another Year?

Man, how much longer is this going to go on? Welcome to the new year, everyone.