Calm the muddy water, it becomes clear

random

2010-09-06T11:13:00.001-07:00

Star Trek Comics!

2009-05-12T22:31:00.000-07:00

I'm three issues in to the first DC Comics Star Trek comic book series. I recently purchased EVERY Star Trek comic from 1967 to 2002 on one handy DVD.

Damn, Mike W. Barr is a good writer! He really knows the characters inside and out, gives them thoughtful and interesting dialogue, creates interesting subplots with secondary characters, and can build a good epic storyline with a palpable sense of danger and a fairly good dose of sci-fi to boot.

Too bad he didn't write the new movie!

Star Trek (2009)

2009-05-09T12:25:00.000-07:00

For me, reviewing this film is a tale of two approaches. One, as a movie, as if I were not a Star Trek fanatic. And two, from the "fan's" perspective.

So all right.

Here is the review "for the rest of you:"

"Star Trek" offers a bold re-imagining of a venerable television science fiction franchise. To a certain extent, it sheds much of the baggage accumulated over 40 years of television and films, giving non-Trekkies an easy entree into the universe.

We are given the tale of Kirk, Spock and McCoy taking the reins of the Starship Enterprise, in a galaxy populated by both humans and other races. James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is a brash young man who is set adrift by the attack of a Romulan villain upon the ship carrying his parents. Without the influence of his father, a Starfleet officer, Kirk has an aimless childhood, squandering his intellect and his drive on bar brawls and car thefts. Luckily, he is intercepted by the wise, gruff Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) and challenged to make a better life for himself and to live up to his ability by joining Starfleet.

There, he meets fellow cadets Uhura (Zoe Saldana), McCoy (Karl Urban), Chekov (Anton Yelchin), Sulu (John Cho), and an irritating instructor, the cool, logical Mr. Spock (Zachary Quinto). Their contrasting styles immediately put them at odds with each other. Spock has grown up the child of two worlds, with a human mother, and a father from Vulcan, a planet whose culture has embraced logic and the shedding of emotion, except perhaps the emotion of racism against humans.

Before their education is complete, they are presented with the threat of the same villain who had killed Kirk's dad 25 years prior - Nero (Eric Bana). Turns out Nero is from the future, and is bent on revenge for the destruction of his home world, Romulus. Also, somewhat confusingly, he blames "Ambassador" Spock for this destruction, even though the Spock we know is younger and clearly not involved.

In a plot development somewhat like "Space Camp," for some reason every other ship is somewhere else, and there are no trained crew members available for the newly-built Enterprise. So the cadets are drafted into service right then and there.

Various plot twists and turns see Kirk marooned on an ice planet, where he meets not only Scotty (a very funny Simon Pegg) but also a much older Spock (Leonard Nimoy). This old spock explains that the visitor from the future has changed history, and that Kirk must team up with the younger Spock, melding their disparate styles and talents into a team that can defeat the threat.

Overall, the plot moves very quickly, and might be a bit confusing to those not versed in Trek lore. But the speed, noise, and bombast are such that pausing to consider holes in story logic (and there are several) is not really feasible until after the movie has finished. The effects, music, and performances are all flashy and dazzling, and it is hard not to feel aggressively entertained by the whole spectacle. Especially charming are Pine as Kirk and Quinto as Spock. Their chemistry works well. The villain, Nero, is somewhat less successful, as his motivations are rather obscure, especially to an audience not familiar with Romulans, time travel, and the like.

It is all done with ample brio and verve - enough panache to surmount its sometimes lazy storytelling and slipshod logic. It is certainly a three-star affair (out of 4). On a scale of ten, I'd give it a solid 7, perhaps even an 8. It is much more entertaining than the average Hollywood popcorn movie, mainly on the strength of the characters and the performances.

Now, for the Trekkies:

"Star Trek" is the product of Hollywood corporate committees, shedding "baggage" in such a way that it dilutes some of the core concepts and appeal of the show which gave rise to the Trekkie faithful.

The characters from the original series are brought together in a way which feels quite far from organic, presumably because Hollywood executives were worried that a slower tale that realistically developed their relationships would fail to satisfy audiences unused to thinking and realism. Instead of being members of a logically coherent military organization, each with careers and internal lives of their own, all of our principal characters are roughly the same age and have the same amount of experience, despite the fact that by the end of the film, they all have different ranks and specailties. Especially galling is the instantaneous promotion of Kirk from 25-year-old Starfleet cadet (in his third year of studies) directly to Captain of the fleet's newest and most advanced flagship. It would be akin to a fresh West Point graduate being given command of the D-Day invasion, or an Annapolis cadet being given command of an aircraft carrier. Why would anyone who had invested a lifetime in this organization respect any order that escapes his lips? Equally puzzling are the promotions of all the other crew members at the end of the film - why is Kirk a Captain, but McCoy a Commander, Uhura a Lieutenant, Chekov an Ensign? They all have the same amount of experience and "seasoning" (i.e., none).

This is the sort of world-breaking contrivance that litters the film. Which is too bad, because "Star Trek (2009)" ably captures the feel of the previous shows, mixing humor, fisticuffs, and dazzling gadgetry in nearly the perfect proportions. It fails, however, to add the integral piece - a logically consistent world, one that creates and follows its own rules, one that is similar enough to our own to be comprehensible, but different and better enough that it inspires admiration and wonder, and makes you yearn to live in it. It is a bit of a tragedy, since just a few tweaks and edits could have turned a story full of workd-breaking holes and missteps into pretty much the best Trek movie ever.

The actors do varyingly good jobs at capturing the essences of their characters, without directly aping previous actors' performances. There are really no clunkers in the group. The quality of special effects is above that of the other films and series, and will definitely impress Trek veterans who are used to less. Many in-jokes and subtler references abound, and will no doubt elicit smiles and chuckles from those who are "in the know."

But that certain something is missing. That special thing which makes something "Trek," and not just "Generic Space Opera #12." There isn't much "Real" science fiction, for one thing - black holes and space ships could have been substituted with quicksand and stage coaches - they are not concepts that drive the plot or the characters or the world, instead they are generic perils, and devices to surmount those dangers. But heck, that could be said of some of the other films, those films that, despite their failings, we would still call "real" Trek. What is missing is the logical consistency of the world. Continuity. "Baggage." In stripping "Star Trek (2009)" down to something that will appeal to a "mass" audience, the producers of this film have denatured it into something reminiscent, but not recognizable.

As Trek, I'd give it 2 stars out of 4, or a 5 of 10. It is better than "Nemesis" or "Final Frontier," to be sure. Those movies were within the "real" Trek universe, but damaged or broke aspects of that universe. This film, owing to its time travel contrivance, blessedly steers clear of "truly" changing any of the "canon." But it also fails to really "be" Star Trek.

So - how good is the movie if I were to attempt to meld (a Vulcan mind meld perhaps?) both perspectives? Well, watching this movie as a Trek fanatic can be something of a bipolar experience. I know I'm being entertained, but something is just wrong. Here's an example: "Star Wars" is a great movie. It is consistently entertaining, has very nice effects, and a surplus of charming performances. But what if it followed 40 years of prior entertainment that functioned by different rules, and broke a fair number of them? Would you care?

So the inner mental story of a Trekkie watching this film is one of trying not to care. Trying to turn the brain off. Trying to ignore something that we love to enjoy something that we like.

I guess it comes down to how rigid and dogmatic I'm feeling about it. It's somewhere between a 5 and an 8, right? It will never go above an 8 of 10, simply because of the lazy storytelling and internal continuity flaws. Whether it climbs above a 5 depends I guess on my mood and on what the seemingly inevitable sequel does to ameliorate these continuity issues.

So let's call it a 7. I guess I'm feeling charitable. But it reflects my ambivalence. I'll still buy it on Blu-Ray. I'll still watch it several times. But If I want a real Trek fix, I'll watch any of the TV series - the medium which, I think, suits Trek best - giving the characters enough time to breathe, villains enough time to develop, and cerebral science fiction stories plenty of opportunities to be tried, even if they fail, and tried again, over hundreds of hours of TV. It doesn't have to be rip-roaring and easy to digest in 2 hours or less. And if I want that, I'll watch Star Trek 2-4, three extremely entertaining films which are also great Trek.

On a more "meta" level, there is one question to consider when evaluating the success or failure of this film in terms of the franchise as a whole. If it inspires a renewed interest in the franchise among a larger cohort of people, what kind of Trek will be produced to meet this demand? Will it be pretty but vapid "Star Wars" style action movies, or will it be the more cerebral, and, to this fan, much more satisfying fare involving sci-fi concepts, philosophical issues, morality plays, and realistically imagined future societies?

I think this film, given the general ease with which it can be enjoyed, will do quite well financially, no doubt inspiring sequels. I just pray to the Great Bird of the Galaxy that those sequels are crafted with greater care and higher-minded concepts than this one was.

***************

What follows are some notes that I jotted down after watching the film. They contain many spoilers, and should only be read by those who have already seen the film.

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Why “Reboot?”

The ‘Kirk as rebel’ stuff didn’t contradict canon. Almost exactly the same story could have been told without a poorly developed time traveling villain.

Problems as a Movie

Is killing trillions really a logical (not Vulcan logic, but astory logic) means of safeguarding Romulus’ future from destruction by an astronomical phenomenon (indeed, how does destroying Vulcan and Earth stop a future supernova?)? Is there no dissension in the ranks among Nero’s fellow miners (not soldiers) in this aim? Is there truly no desire among this crew to simply return to the Romulus of ~125 years prior and simply start over?
Why would Nero “maroon” Spock on a planet with a Starfleet base upon it? Why not just keep him on the ship, where he’ll get a much better view of the destruction of Vulcan? Where is this other planet such that it can view Vulcan’s destruction with the same apparent size in the sky as a nearby satellite?
Time traveling villain necessitates long exposition of things non-Trekkies would not be able to (or care to) fathom.
Shooting at the long, spindly drill boring into your planet never occurred to anyone before the climax of the film?

Problems as Trek

So Kirk can be promoted from Starfleet cadet (not even graduate) to Captain, with no intermediate steps? Was everyone else on the SpaceCamp voyage of the Enterprise also granted immediate commissions? Why does Kirk get to be Captain, whilst Uhura is a lieutenant, Chekov is an ensign, etc.? Why would anyone who had been in Starfleet and earned various promotions in rank prior to this event take orders from Kirk?
“Transwarp beaming?” Seriously? And as something which Scotty has “invented” at least in concept, BEFORE the original series? Sounds like “transwarp lazy writing” to me.
So Engineering is a big warehouse with butt-loads of scaffolding, and no one around?
What the hell are the duties of the keepers of the "katric ark," and how effective are these duties, if they involve standing around while your planet is being attacked?
Either use Stardates or Julian calendar dates. Not both. Especially not in the same sentence.

Successes as a Movie

Good emotional core to protagonist character motivations (as opposed to antagonist characters).
Nice looking special effects.
Very good performances by the principal "hero" characters, especially Chris Pine.

Successes as Trek

Very good performances by most actors in roles, not straight imitation, but creation of character essences instead.
Enterprise exterior didn’t look nearly as bad in motion as preview stills looked.
Nice mix of space action, fisticuffs, humor, and character stories - very appropriate and reminiscent of "classic" Trek.

In case anyone is still curious about my opinions on movies and Trek, here are some quick and dirty ratings (out of 10) for all of the franchise's films:

7 - The Motion Picture
10 -The Wrath of Khan
8 -The Search for Spock
9 -The Voyage Home
4 -Final Frontier
7 -The Undiscovered Country
7 -Generations
8 -First Contact
6 -Insurrection
3 -Nemesis
7 -Star Trek (2009)

Here they are in order of my personal preference/estimation:

10 -The Wrath of Khan
9 -The Voyage Home
8 -The Search for Spock
8 -First Contact
7 -Generations
7 -The Motion Picture
7 -The Undiscovered Country
7 -Star Trek (2009)
6 -Insurrection
4 -Final Frontier
3 -Nemesis

Hulu... creeping its way into my heart....

2009-04-07T00:25:00.000-07:00

I've been watching a lot of Hulu lately, and it's made me rethink some of the statements below about Internet TV. I would upgrade the selection and reliability scores by 1 point apiece, bringing the total to 15 out of 25. It's not there yet as a completely viable replacement for cable, but it's making great strides. It's got shows in widescreen, commercial breaks are only one spot long (usually very short), I can stream it to my PS3 with a program called Playon, and it has shows from all networks but CBS (lam-oes!). I can catch up on stuff like Simpsons without having to schedule my life around it.

One show I've been enjoying the hell out of is "Kings." It's an alternate reality drama in which a modern day kingdom replaces the USA. It's beautifully shot, well acted, and only occasionally hammily scripted. There's lots of intrigue, occasions to think about right vs. might, the needs of the many over the few, etc. etc. Any sci-fi fan should like it - which means, of course, that it will fail on NBC. Hopefully, they will move it over to the Sci-fi network where shows like that (BSG, ahem) can actually succeed. Anyway, I recommend it to my friends, especially YOU, Kevin, since it has a very prominent gay character with pouty lips whom I'm sure you would LOOOOVE to see naked.

The future of television isn't here quite yet...

2009-01-21T19:09:00.000-08:00

Lately, the Internet has been rife with two sorts of stories: one, proclaiming that the future is here, and it is streaming, downloading, digital all the way. The other is that, correspondingly, all "old media" will be disappearing, if they haven't already, like dinosaurs withering under a comet's glare.

The contrarian in me resists all such attempts to so neatly declare something so sweeping. After all, the last distributor of VHS just closed its doors, and people still cling to their vinyl, let alone ditching their CD collections.

But there is something to it. A new media marketplace is slowly gestating, one which offers a lot of exciting potential. But it's not here yet, and I don't think it will be truly functioning well for at least 5 years, with anything close to mass penetration 5 years after that.

One target that fans of digital content delivery like to pick on is Blu-Ray. Why would anyone, they ask, want to purchase and keep a bunch of silly optical discs in their home, taking up shelf space, costing $15-$25, etc. etc.?

Well, let's look at the situation. I am a consumer with a taste for high quality audio and video. I do not have an extremely high budget, but I'm willing to pay for quality. So let's put it in these terms. I believe the average consumer wants several things from his or her media solution. These things are:

Price - the overall outlay in a month, or per view.
Selection - access to a wide variety of media, e.g. television shows, movies, and Internet videos.
Quality - the audio-visual fidelity of the media.
Reliability - Can you get it when you want it, without worrying about dropouts?
Convenience - Amount of labor involved, ability to tailor schedules.

So, to my mind, the best solution is the one which hits on all of these factors to the maximum extent. Also, I want the content to be on my television, not on a laptop or PC. I paid big bucks for my TV and I want to watch my media on it. Therefore, for alternative media delivery choices, I want them to either stream to my TV from my PC or to be natively sent to my TV by a stand-alone device. Now let's assess the available content delivery systems that we as consumers have before us today.

Cable Television
Cable providers, not too keen on the idea of relinquishing their stranglehold on consumers' media wallets, have made strides towards increasing their offerings and improving in many of the major categories listed above.
Price: 1 Price has been and will continue to be cable's big downfall. Most basic packages start at $50, and many "fully featured" digital packages are $80 and up, per month. Aggressive nickel and diming of features, such as a very common $10 per month "HD Add-On" (as if they had to do something special besides tell your cable box to allow it), and $5 to $10 DVR "rental" fees (as if it just weren't another cable box, just like the non-DVR model) do not help. Basically, cable is a rip-off, big time.
Selection: 4 They have always ruled the roost in terms of Selection - carrying most or all broadcast stations, most or all cable stations, and many movie channels. Recent additions have included "video on demand," in which Cable company servers host videos and feature films from various channels and sources, which can be accessed at any time.
Quality: 3 Used to be very good, but an aging infrastructure has led to compression of signals. The service that your cable company touts as "all digital quality" actually may look worse than analog service from 10 years ago. It's simple math. If you've got a tube yay big, and you want to cram more information through it, the quality of each discrete piece of information will have to be compressed to allow it. HD on cable looks like crap, frankly, no better than 480p DVD, and usually not even that good.
Reliability: 5 Reliability is probably cable's biggest draw besides selection. If it's buried in the ground, chances are it's never going to cut out.
Convenience: 4 Used to be as bad as regular TV, but DVR-capable cable boxes have made convenience at least a middling proposition, now. On the plus side, you never have to leave your living room or couch. On the minus side, "On Demand" offerings are not yet comprehensive. If Cable companies really get their act together here, I think people will flock to it in droves, as long as they keep their prices under control.
Cable TV Total: 17 out of 25

Satellite TV
A subset of cable providers, satellite is essentially the same business model delivered by a dish on your house. All of the factors listed above for cable are the same except for reliability. In a big storm or with a lot of snow on your dish, your signal might cut out. So minus 2 points on reliability, from 5 to 3.
Satellite TV Total: 15 out of 25

Netflix Streaming
Price 5: Netflix has loads of pricing options - but the bottom line is, you can get unlimited access to Netflix's streaming library for about $10 a month.
Selection 1: This is Netflix's great challenge right now. Only about ten percent (or less) of their DVD library is available to watch instantly. So there are lots of movies and TV shows, but it's very hit and miss. You'll find things to watch, but it's conceivable to run out of things in a few months' time, too.
Quality 2: Another thorn in Netflix's side is quality. To be fair, it is better than straight Internet TV sites. But it is not as good as cable, nor is it as good as optical media. Audio is strictly limited to stereo, and subtitles and special features are non-existent.
Reliability 3: It's essentially as reliable as your Internet connection. Which, for most people, isn't all that reliable, especially if wireless comes into play.
Convenience 5: Having unlimited access to a content library is great. Watch any TV episode or any movie at any time, all from your couch. This is what the future should look like.
Netflix Streaming Total: 16 out of 25

Netflix By Mail
Price 4: The same above applies here. You have lots of options for pricing, between 10 and 40 bucks a month, with all offering basically the same service, just at a higher or lower capacity (i.e. number of discs at a time). However, to get a comparable amount of programming to the streaming option, you will have to spend $20 instead of $10.
Selection 3: You have basically unlimited choice of anything that's been committed to optical disc. So the newest TV is out, but most networks are pushing their shows out pretty quickly onto DVD. Public television generally gets their documentaries out, but not their local interest programming. Movies are generally comprehensively available.
Quality 5: You can get DVD quality A/V, and HD quality A/V, with Blu-Ray disc rentals. The quality of a DVD is generally at or better than most cable television, and the quality of 1080p Blu-Ray HD simply blows cable, Internet, and broadcast HD out of the water. If quality is your number one concern, optical media cannot be beat.
Reliability 4: Broken discs have seemed to increase of late. Otherwise, if you get it unbroken, it ought to play, no matter what.
Convenience 2: You're at the mercy of the Queue, and how many other people want the same disc. If a disc is in demand, you might wait a month. You also have to leave the house to mail your returns. On the other hand, postage is paid for you, and you could conceivably copy the DVD content onto your hard drive or onto your own media, though I of course would have absolutely no knowledge of how to do such a dastardly thing.
Netflix By Mail Total: 18 out of 25

Itunes/Playstation Network/Xbox Live
Price 1: The pricing schemes of these online providers are a joke. Prices generally range from $1 to $2 per episode of television. Time limited rentals of movies range from $3 to $5 depending on quality, and purchases of movies are usually $15 to $20. If you want to watch more than 10 hours of programming in a month, you'll have already surpassed Cable or Netflix in monthly costs. Simply unacceptable.
Selection 1: About as good as Netflix's streaming offerings. You will not find the newest TV or a complete back catalog of films.
Quality 4: DVD and HD quality video will generally be comparable, although some on the web claim slight degradation when compared to optical media. Audio may be limited to stereo, subtitles may be absent.
Reliability 3: The videos will generally play. If you're using a PC or Mac, your hardware reliability is the factor here. But what happens if the leasing/selling company stops operations? Will DRM keys expire and you will no longer have access to media you paid for? Worrisome.
Convenience 3: Having an online store and storing the content locally gives you basically unlimited scheduling power. But you are limited by your storage space, which for game consoles is usually not great, and for computers, there is the problem of sharing space with other computing necessities.
Online Stores Total: 12 out of 25

Internet Television
Price 5: How good is free? Sounds like a pretty good price to me. Yes, you pay for your Internet connection, but how many of us would not have had that already for other purposes? So yes, essentially, it's free. You are not paying extra for anything.
Selection 1: Ouch. Most companies limit their available catalogs to 4 or 5 recent episodes of a show. Hulu.com has made some strides in getting back catalogs of shows, but it is VERY spotty. No movies, either.
Quality 1: Ever watch a youtube video? That's the worst of what you'll see here. Blocky, pixellated mush. At best, you'll get a widescreen image that's a bit worse than DVD. Stereo only, and subtitles are not ubiquitous.
Reliability 2: some sites seem to crumble at random times, possibly due to server load. Netflix is way better, here.
Convenience 4: The same bonuses that Netflix Streaming has apply here. Watch whatever, whenever. You do, however, have to diddle with your computer to make sure it works.
Internet TV Total: 13 out of 25

Optical Media purchased a la carte
Price 1: Well, you can find movies on Amazon for $10 and TV shows on DVD can be found to average about $1 a show. But once you've bought it, you own it. But new stuff is premium-priced. So it's not much better than online stores on the price front.
Selection 3: The same as Netflix by mail. Older TV, all movies, many documentaries.
Quality 5: Again, like Netflix, optical media simply cannot be bested by any other format in terms of stable, reliable, high quality audio and visual fidelity. There is no compression based upon usage or program load.
Reliability 5: Have a DVD player? Has it ever broken because of the weather outside? Didn't think so. As long as you have working hardware, you also have a pristine disc from the package to play in it. No amount of DRM and no company going under will ever impact your ability to play the content you paid for.
Convenience 2: You have to order it from a store, go to a store, and then find a shelf to store your media upon. But you can watch it whenever you want.
Optical Media Total: 16 out of 25

Broadcast Television
Price 4: Free, with a but. You need a good antenna and a nice TV to pull in a decent HD signal from your local broadcast stations. These are extras, so the price rating goes down a tick.
Selection 1: Major networks, PBS, and a few local espanol stations. Nice if you want new TV and local interest programming, but pretty crap for anything else. Many sports broadcasts are also on pay TV now.
Quality 4: Generally better than cable and satellite, simply because there is less compression. There is still some compression, however, so optical still wins here. Digital over-the-air broadcasts are "all or nothing," so fuzz and interference are not a factor.
Reliability 4: Weather can play a role, unfortunately. Not as good as cable, better than satellite.
Convenience 2: Welcome to the old days. Watch the show when it's on, and at no other time. You can supply your own DVR, but the planning and programming you will have to engage in isn't exactly "convenient."
Broadcast TV Total: 15 out of 25

So, let's sum up. If you want quality, optical is the way to go. If you want price, Netflix, Internet, or Broadcast TV are the winners. If you want convenience, Cable or Netflix are the best. If you want selection, Cable is king. But basically, none of these services hits on all five points across the board. If you care about more than one of any of these factors, you're going to have to pick and choose from each provider carefully. Most probably do Cable plus Broadcast, Cable plus Optical a la carte, or Cable plus Netflix.

So what does the perfect media solution look like? I would say it looks the most like Netflix's streaming model, but with a much improved selection. If one company could combine the On-Demand capability of cable, the movie catalog of Netflix, the new TV and local interest shows of Cable and Broadcast, at the price of Netflix, you'd have a juggernaut.

Unfortunately, it seems the companies in the best position to do this are cable providers. They already have deals with local entities such as sports teams and local stations to provide their content. They are working to get a back catalog of movies to stream "On-Demand." They offer DVR. but they do it at such an anal-raping price point that we still want to find an alternative.

To overcome that, one company, let's say Netflix for the sake of argument, would have to negotiate with the networks to be able to stream their new shows, like Hulu.com, for a certain time window - let's say for 8 weeks after "premiere." The could negotiate pay-per-view agreements with sports teams (which they would LOOOOVE) to show their events. Hopefully this could be kept to 50 cents per game or so (which would total about $90 over 6 months for a baseball season, which is a lot less than 6 months of cable/satellite service). And they can expand their On-Demand movie catalog so that it is basically comprehensive. Can all this be done for $30 to $40 per month? If it could, I'd ditch cable and sign up in a heartbeat.

However, this is all future talk. If the question is: are any of these options going to die soon, I would say no. They all have a niche in the market, providing one thing better than all of the others. Until one provider starts really slamming its competitors out of those niches, I don't see any of them, whether it be optical media, broadcast TV, or anyone else, going away.

Obama's inaugural speech

2009-01-20T11:45:00.001-08:00

Well, JFK it wasn't . Wasn't FDR, either. It was decent, so-so, not too long thankfully, some highs and lows. So here are my reactions.

"My fellow citizens..."

I like this. It starts on a different note. Usually, it's "Americans," which is a mushier term that doesn't denote anything but being part of a big, privileged group of fat people. Citizen implies responsibility, membership in a polis, a unity of purpose and an ideology of commitment to living life as humans ought to live it, within a civilization.

"Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath."

Um, actually, only 43. Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms, but by most definitions was still the same person. Not an encouraging boo-boo. That's already a letter grade, Mr. Obama.

"Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred."

Oh boy. I don't like this statement one bit. We are not in a declared war against any nation or entity. Is there a declaration of war against Al Quaeda or the Taliban? There can't be. They are not governments. We are engaged in military activities against small enclaves, sure. But buying into this war talk is a really frightening continuance of the Orwellian newspeak of the past 8 years, designed to justify any old thing that the unitary executive feels like pushing through the congress, or minus any oversight, through secret executive orders.

"each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet."

Yay, someone is mentioning scienc-ey stuff! Also, it is useful, if not exactly stunningly original, to draw the parallel that our energy usage enriches governments who are not necessarily opposed to the types of organizations that we are engaged in combat with. It needed to be said, and finally it is said on a big stage. Ditto the mention of a warming planet being the result of our choices, not just God hugging us extra close.

"On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics."

Just who is this supposed to be directed at? The Republicans on the rostrum, or the idiots who voted for them in the crowd? I am perplexed by this statement and really don't see much good which can come from it. Yes, they're stupid. Yes, they preyed on fear. But you won, dude. Trying deliberately to rebuke them is probably not the most constructive first foot forward.

"But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed. "

In a sea of platitudes (regarding the crisis we're in, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, etc.) this sentence finally puts a little bit of a tooth into the mix. It's one thing to just spew a bunch of nonspecific crap about rolling up our sleeves and using a little elbow grease. But it's another to say: We have put off unpleasant decisions. This is about as far as Obama goes in saying that our government has been fatally shortsighted on things like national debt, social security, and global warming. But at least the implication is there.

We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.

This is pretty much the meat of the speech for techies and intellectuals. Restoring science to its rightful place is a good, specific jab at the past 8 years, not the sort of amorphous accusation that the previous 'hope over fear' stuff represents. It's a pretty clear implication that global warming won't be treated as a theory, evolution will be taught in schools, and stem cell research will be opened way up again. So Amen to that.

I'm kind of worried about "soil" in this mix, because it implies (to me anyway) ethanol cars and "clean coal" plants with buried carbon sequestration. These are stupid ideas which will just keep us on the path to ecological ruin. I wish he had said harness the atom instead of harness the soil.

"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. "

Ooh, awkward 'Bush is on the stage too' moment! I don't hate this. As opposed to the previous statement which seems designed to simply piss off Republicans in its overbroad reach and lack of specificity, this is a specific and more personal rebuke, and something which needed to be said. He goes on to say that we need to remember that strong alliances and cooperation between nations were keys in defeating fascism and communism, not just spending a butt-load on weapons and doing whatever the hell we pleased. It's not too hard to see who and what this is directed at.

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers."

A shout out to atheists! Woo! The Scientologists are probably feeling slighted though, perhaps Wiccans, too. It's nice to have atheism publicly mentioned as something other than a slimy scourge. Hopefully, this good feeling lasts - because the rest of the speech has so much God-talk in it that you'd never know that atheists were in fox-holes, too.

"To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect."

I like this. Many people see our geopolitical stage now as a clash between "the west" and "the ragheads." It is good to acknowledge this, but also to see a path out by respecting common humanity. I wish it had been a bit more specific as to what those interests were, but oh well.

"To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. "

Well, maybe this is the specificity, since many of the Muslims above are also in this category. Nice to mention minds in addition to bodies.

"Let it be told to the future world ... that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet (it)."

Very interesting that a Washington quote is cited here. I think it is apropos to the theme of the speech. He nicely picked up the imagery of crossing icy currents and the like, and it dovetails nicely back to the beginning, the theme of citizenship.

Overall, it was an OK speech. There was a lot of mush in there. I would have preferred that the things I cited above as strengths were expanded and fleshed out, while the weaknesses were simply excised. JFK's speech was a masterpiece of construction, whereas this came off as a bit flabby, with a few good ideas peppered within. This isn't a speech that will ring through the ages as one which inspired people. It will soon be forgotten. But speeches do not presidencies make, at least not usually. If progress can be made on putting the ideas into action with concrete and effective policies, that will be more than enough for me.

Overall grade: C+. Please revise and submit a new draft.

Reboot my heart, please. Or... PARALYZED BY TREK-FEAR!!!

2008-11-17T23:14:00.000-08:00

The ultimate post to a blog is, in my mind, "what some nerd thinks about Star Trek." Homer Simpson said it best - this is what the Internet was made for.

So let's cut right to it. Star Trek, according to some people who don't know a whole lot, is "in trouble." It needs a "reboot." This is Hollywood-ese for "reboots are hot right now, so what intellectual property do we have that can get on that gravy train?" (See James Bond, Batman, Superman, Get Smart, Dukes of Hazzard, Charlie's Angels... the list goes on...)

Trek is the newest property to rate the treatment. Apparently, millions of fans between ages 25 and 85 with shitloads of disposable income is not satisfying to CBS/Paramount. Also, happily for them, Gene Roddenberry is dead and the dynamic duo of Berman/Braga have been (rightfully) thoroughly discredited by Enterprise and Nemesis. So the handoff has been arranged to JJ Abrams, he of Alias, which word has it is a good television show. Is it Star Trek good? Well, I don't know, I've only seen a minute or two of it.

What I do know is what Trek is about and why it is good. Star Trek is the crystallization of an idea, a vision of the future. The idea is that mankind can learn, and when we do, we will progressively work our way out of the mire of violence, irrationality and fear that pervades all of human history thus far. We will lay aside our arms and our prejudices and work towards our betterment, both individually and collectively. We will graduate from our tumultuous childhood as a race and take our place as a self actualized adult species, among the stars.

This idea, and its dramatization, is very appealing to nerds and intellectuals. But it doesn't have enough tits or fistfights for Hollywood executives. So first, they tried Enterprise, a series which promised less of the talky high-minded blather of "classic" Trek like TOS and TNG, and more rough and tumble action, plus lotion-smearing nudity. It went over like a lead balloon. For some reason, intellectuals never warmed to Trek minus 20 IQ points, while people who enjoyed tits, ass and violence found better sources for their daily fix. Whodathunk?

The series went off the air after 4 seasons (the last of which had improved considerably, by actually respecting continuity and by doing things like [gasp!] introducing big ideas and developing characters.). Industry bigwigs fretted. Had Trek lost its mojo? Clearly, the once-dependable nerd segment had abandoned it. I mean, churn out any old chum and they'll buy it, right?

So it came time to "reboot." But when you reboot a franchise, why try out new ideas when old ones are so much easier and cheaper to exploit? Let's just redo the same story with the same characters, and let the performances of previous actors and the efforst of previous writers bedamned!

OK. OK. Calm down. Vitriol rising. The rational part of me tries to remind itself that it is OK to reinterpret great stories. Superman has been in comics and movies for 70 years. Batman nearly as long. Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, there's a reason these stories can persist for so long and through so many iterations. But the fanboy in me retorts: Trek, as a drama, is BUILT upon continuity and consistency. It rewards the nerdy obsessive by referencing its past. Its "world" lends credence to the animating vision of Trek - this is a real place, with real cultures, which could really happen.

So any judgment I make of a new movie which recapitulates territory already tread upon is going to be colored by this. I want it to FIT with the superstructure of all the things I love in Trek. I don't want it to contradict the thing I've devoted countless hours to enjoying, pondering, rewatching. It's a high standard, to be sure - one of the reasons it's so much easier to move forward in the Trek timeline, and so perilous to go backwards and do "prequels" (I think George Lucas has discovered this as well...).

OK. On to the trailer.

We start out in Iowa. Or something kind of like Iowa, because there's lots of desert-ey gorges and stuff. But clearly, the cherry red Corvette (WHAAAA???!?!?) which speeds through the frame is escaping a... hay farm... of some sort. Hulking silhouettes in the distance tell us that this is THE FUTURE.

I will say, it's a neat look. I like stuff that's futur-ey. I hope they establish that the car is a collectible and has had an engine swap out. Cars running on petroleum in the 23rd century strain my credulity and offend my progressive sensibilities.

Then a hoverbike gives chase. It's marked "POLICE" and is driven by someone who looks like this:
Umm... yeah. Since it still walks like a human, I'm holding out hope that it is a human underneath this stuff. Because if it isn't, we've committed continuity boo boo number one - there are no sentient androids in the Trek universe yet. (Don't get me started on Nemesis...)

Apparently Kirk is a juvenile delinquent. Well, that sort of contradicts TOS, which makes Kirk out to be "a walking encyclopedia," but I can take it. That was in the academy, whereas this may be earlier. We then get a voiceover, apparently delivered by Captain Pike, telling Kirk that he is a drifter with a destiny, to join the few, the proud, the Starfleet. Visually, we are treated to Kirk on his motorcycle (with wheels, apparently only the cops get hoverbikes) driving out into the wilderness, where a STARSHIP is being constructed.

OK. As much as I have issues with some of the alterations to the Enterprise's design, I will admit readily that this image is quite cool. There has been a raging geek debate as to whether a starship could be constructed on Earth, but I point to the dedication plaque in TOS, which states that the Enterprise was built in San Fran. So as long as this as San Fran, we're cool, right? (Grrr... anticipating being let down...)

Another potential continuity problem I have is the implied Pike/Kirk relationship. At no point in Pike's two episodes in TOS Trek was any such relationship suggested. Pike is not Kirk's mentor, that's that. MAAAAYBE he could be construed as Spock's mentor. And MAAAYBE this voice over is actually directed towards Spock. But those are some pretty big maybes.

Speaking of Spock, we then shift to Vulcan. Frankly, I have little to no problem with any of this footage. Sarek looks great, Amanda looks good (and decidedly non-Winona Ryder-esque), the sets look great, there's really just nothing in the trailer to make the Trekkie in me worry about Vulcan as a whole. There's no mention of logic or lack of emotion, but there's nothing which specifically contradicts it, either.

Okay, er, maybe there's that. But look carefully. CLEARLY, this is some sort of backwards anti-matter universe. So there's no inherent contradiction. Ha ha. Seriously, Spock is half human and has impulse control problems, and not just during Pon Farr if you know what I mean (I hear the Vulcan High Command has developed a soothing cream for delaying impulses in that area...).

After Vulcan, we shift in the trailer to what I will refer to as the "impossibly quick-cut action movie montage." Let's look at some vital bits.

Here in some sort of hangar, presumably on Earth, is a big bunch of people in red shirts, and a guy with a clipboard. They are apparently going to board some sort of personnel carrier with NCC 1701 indicia on the side. Who are these people? Why are they here? Hmm. Maybe this is supposed to be the Enterprise's first flight, and this is the initial crew. The fact that they're all in red either indicates that they are all engineering or security personnel, or that they're all going to eat it very soon, much to their chagrin I'm sure. But then, maybe they don't know the whole "Red Shirt" thing yet.

Well. They must not die yet, because here, presumably on the personnel carrier, are Kirk, McCoy, and some of said Red Shirts. McCoy at least is in civilian gear. Why is he boarding the Enterprise? Wasn't Dr. Boyce the ship's doctor before McCoy in Trek canon? Are they sneaking on? Are they prisoners? Are Kirk and McCoy friends with a relationship preexisting their time on the ship?

And now, it is time to gripe about canon:

Here we have Kirk, in non-captain gear, sharing the frame with Sulu on the right and Chekov on the left. How do I know it is non-captain gear?

Well, for one, here's a shot of Captain Pike and black-duds-Kirk together. If Pike is the captain, Kirk is not, eh? Sure, maybe it's an undershirt which the colored uni goes over, but still.

Then:

Here is Kirk as he says "buckle up!"

Yep, we had better buckle up if this montage of images is any indication. All reports have indicated that this movie will be (groan) a time-travel story. This conceit allows Old Spock (Leonard Nimoy) to be in the same flick as Young Spock (Sylar) and Young Kirk.

So somehow, this plot must take us from a time when Kirk is a Corvette-driving tot, a disaffected punk not in Starfleet as yet (see io9.com's spoilers to this effect), Pike is captain and Kirk is not, to a time in which Kirk is captain and Chekov is the navigator, and still be coherent?

There are two options. Either the above is somehow true (well, maybe not the coherent part), or they have tossed canon out the window. Young Kirk cannot be on the bridge with Chekov, who came aboard the Enterprise at least halfway into its first year of Kirk's five-year mission.

Various minor-spoiler-laden previews have indicated that "Nero" changes the timeline, such that various aspects of Kirk's life, including his bookishness, are eliminated, and that certain characters work to set the timeline straight. But I don't want to strain my brain any further trying to make the images cohere into a workable story with time travel (ugh). Instead, let's assume that canon has been dumped by Abrams and Co. The question becomes: should we care?

Perhaps there is an argument for a "reboot" which not only starts things over with better special effects, but also changes story elements and character biographies. Superman no longer is a reporten in the 1930's, right? James Bond uses a cellphone. Okay, fine.

On the other hand, this is THE FUTURE. There is no need to update it in any appreciable way. Sure, our technology can catch up with things and make the tricorder seem too big for its britches as a prop. But no twist of logic can make it necessary to make sure that all the principal actors of the series magically appear at the same time, regardless of relative differences in character age, except one: Hollywood dipshits looked at the project and said "Well, we'd better get all the characters the nerds love onto the screen, or no one will like it."

Except they are wrong. We Trek Nerds love consistency and continuity. They are our reward for watching every series and movie five times or more. They make the world seem more realistic - especially nice when it is a world we so desperately wish were real. It is not a detriment to have characters appear at different times in the narrative - it is a strength. Real military organizations have a real turnover of people. Pike was captain before Kirk. Kirk took over, after having had a full career on his own beforehand. Spock started with Pike as science officer, then was promoted to first officer by Kirk. Kirk brought his own choice of Chief Medical Officer on board, replacing Boyce. This is a rich, complex, and REALISTIC narrative. It cheapens and, dare I say, shits upon it to have all of the above characters (sans Boyce) on the ship at once. Not only that, the prospect of it really pisses me off.

Would you think it was cool if Simon and Schuster released a new "Complete Shakespeare" in which Romeo and Juliet survive at the end, or where King Lear and Lady MacBeth get together for tea? Oh, come on, you idiot purists, these ideas would be FUN!

No. Trek exists as a work of art, created by its writers, editors, and its actors. It should be respected just like Shakespeare or David Mamet or (just to twist the retcon knife a little) Star Wars. We don't have to eat shit and call it ice cream when you take the characters we love and "remix" them. Retconning fucking sucks, and that's that.

So I will go on record hoping that there is some explanation for all of this that somehow: ties it all together in a neat, continuity-preserving bow; and doesn't fall apart under the weight of its own complex absurdity.

I'll tell you, my hopes are not very high. Sigh.

Now that we're on the topic of movies which retcon and suck, let's talk briefly about Nemesis. Nemesis committed two or three unpardonable sins - both as a movie in general and as a Trek movie in particular. Retconning was out of control here. The Romulans suddenly had a myterious conterpart race, the Remans, who ran things behind the scenes and look like Orcs, ostensibly for some reason beyond being obvious bad guys. Then, you have B4, the mysterious android that Noonien Soong built before Lore and Data, although TNG specifically states that this is not the case. Then, you have the credulity straining Clone plot, in which a bald Picard (though he clearly had hair in his academy appearances in TNG) is somehow DNA-sampled without his knowledge a long time ago and hears nothing of it for years and years, and then somehow GIVES A SHIT when he shows up to BE THE VILLIAN, OOOH SCARY. Plus, he's in charge of everything for some reason, despite the Romulans being a fiercely xenophobic and racist/supremacist society.

In a word, well, two words, it SUCKED ASS. It took a formerly interesting and nuanced society within Trek and reduced it to a one-note, silly caricature, with an unbelievable leader who wasn't even a member of the race.

Here's Shinzon:
Ooh, scary, right? He's DRESSED IN BLACK, the universal symbol for "hey everyone, this is the BAD GUY."

Here's Shinzon's ship:
What's a villain without a gigantic, overcompensating and completely unrealistic BAD GUY SHIP? I mean, Darth Vader had one. Let precedent bedamned. Let logic bedamned! Who cares if it makes no sense that this SECRET SOCIETY WHICH RUNS THINGS BEHIND THE SCENES for some reaosn also has mega-gigantor ships which can kill us all?

OK, let's compara and contrast. Here's "Nero," the time travelling Romulan bad guy par excellence:
Ooh, scary, right? He's DRESSED IN BLACK, the universal symbol for "hey everyone, this is the BAD GUY." Plus, he has a big, pointy, scary stick.

Here's his ship:
OOH, scary and, well, completely out of fucking whack compared to anything in Romulan history,

Starting to see the resemblance?

Why does every movie have to have a BIG VILLAIN? Yes, it worked in Star Trek II. But: That was mother-frakkin KAHN, and he still had a whole cadre of people behind him, and represented a big sci-fi concept, genetic engineering. But after a certain point, it just becomes stupid. Who the heck are these races that they all have one big villain who runs everything, but the threat represented completely dissipates when they are vanquished?

I find it really insulting that writers and directors feel the need to simplify their stories to this degree. The Borg were MUCH SCARIER when they were a monolithic entity with no head, just an unstoppable collective force. Then, thanks to movies, we get the Borg Queen. Then we had the attack of F. Murray Abraham and the Sona, who looked suspiciously like Shinzon and our pal Nero. It's clearly movies that are doing this - we only have 2 hours to tell a story, so we'd better simplify and boil down the conflict as much as possible, yes?

I think it needs to be said: Star Trek works best as a television show. TV allows writers the time to develop stories, races, villains, plots, that don't need to be wrapped up in 2 hours. Even when there are singular villains, TV allows for the complexity of a Gul Dukat, Weyoun or Kai Winn, the slow evolution of a character from whiny dweeb (Wesley) or ethnic stereotype (Worf) into a complex hero with his or her own internal life as a character.

Movies just don't do it. There's too much pressure to be the over the top bad guy, or to develop a heroic character in the most simplistic way possible...

... to overload our senses with stupid action set pieces....
...
...or confound our brains with CGI shots that progressively numb us to reality and make us forget the plot, if any (a la Star Wars Episode 3)...

Ugh.

OK. Summary time.

Best case scenario: all of my fears are unfounded. Abrams and his team craft a story that is not only dramatic and entertaining, but also rings true to the Trek ethos, respects what has come before, and wins legions of new fans to the franchise, allowing it to spread its wings again on television, the medium which can best accommodate its big ideas and scope.

Medium case scenario: It's a dumb, pretty action movie which gains some fans, but turns off others. It is not true to the ethos and simply works to offend the faithful. It may result in more movies or perhaps another Enterprise-level show. This walk through with comments by Abrams seems to confirm this as the most likely, e.g. "This is a treatment of Star Trek with action and comedy and romance and adventure, as opposed to a rather talky geekfest."

Worst case: It's an incomprehensible disaster which turns off both the mouth-breaters and the intellectual Trekkers. CBS/Paramount decides to call the whole thing off and Star Trek ;languishes for decades, giving us nothing new to watch, enjoy, debate, love, or hate.

Which will it be? I don't know. You tell me. Here is an article which does nothing to quell these fears (the linked articles are informative as well. In the meantime, here's another pretty picture.

Modern Snake Oil: The "Upconverter"

2008-06-30T07:31:00.000-07:00

I've finally lost it. I simply cannot take one more mention of, news story about, or claim that an "upconverting dvd player" will give you a picture which is "almost as good as HD."

A quick primer: digital devices display an image at a certain resolution. Many PC monitors, for instance, display at 1,024 x 768. This means the image is 1,024 pixels wide by 768 pixels tall, making for a total of 786,432 discrete pieces of possible information which can be displayed on your screen. Most TVs before the big HD/flat panel wave display an image at 720 x 480, which multiplies out to 345,600 pixels. Less information, right? Certainly you've noticed that your PC monitor looks sharper than your old TV. Most new televisions display images at 1280 x 720 or 1920 x 1080 resolution, equaling 921,600 and 2,073,600 pixels, respectively. This is significantly more detail than is possible with a 480i/p screen.

Wait: i or p? Don't fret. I stands for "interlaced" while p stands for "progressive." This simply describes the way the display renders the image on the screen. Have you ever seen a video of a TV screen on TV? Notice how it flickers? That's interlacing. The screen renders half the image at a time - faster than your eye can see, but not fast enough to fool a camera. Old style PC monitors have a setting called "refresh rate" which fiddles with the speed at which the screen interlaces. The higher the refresh rate, the less likely you will notice any flickering while the screen draws each half of the image. On the other hand, if you take a video or a still picture of a progressive screen, you will always see the entire thing, no flickering whatsoever. That's because the display draws the entire image and it doesn't have to refresh 24 or 30 times a second, instead the display merely needs to keep up with changes in the image (this is not refresh rate, but response time). It looks more stable than an interlaced image.

All right, i/p lesson complete. So: DVD was introduced the mid 1990s, with the intent of offering a good storage medium for computer files as well as a better video source than VHS. VHS plays an analog image at 330 x 480, for a total of 158,400 pixels on the screen. This is sort of a pseudo-480i image - it doesn't offer the full horizontal resolution. DVD, on the other hand, is encoded digitally at 720 x 480, for a total of 345,600 pixels. As anyone could plainly see, even on an old television, DVD offered a picture which was twice as sharp at VHS. All was good. We were all in video nirvana.

But then, TV got better. High definition televisions, or those capable of displaying 720p and up, hit the market. Programming was sparse at first, but eventually networks and PBS stations began offering programs recorded and encoded at 720p and even 1080i (but not p) over the air. Just as the comparison between VHS and DVD, seeing the difference between an image at 345,600 vs. one at 2,073,600 pixels was pretty glaring. Things look "real" at the much higher resolutions. We want THAT for our movies!

So, enterprising DVD player manufacturers set to work on adapting the most successful video format ever (DVD) to these new sets. Well, heck, if you can just show the 480p disc at 720p or 1080p resolutions, it will look better, right?

Well, no. Imagine that the 480p image is composed of 480 lines alternating between red and blue (forget for the moment why you would wish to watch such an image!). If you "upconverted" that image to 960p, what would you have? You'd have an image full of lines which are two pixels wide instead of one pixel wide. You are not seeing any more detail. There are still and always only 480 lines.

But remember that digital displays such as LCD monitors display everything at their native resolution, whatever it is. Many LCD screens used for home theater viewing, for instance, display at 1366 x 768. That's 1,049,088 pixels. Woo hoo! That's more detailed than DVD, right? Sure, if you feed it a signal that has more detail that DVD. But if you pop in a DVD, you will still see that same image of 480 alternating lines. They'll just be 1.6 pixels wide instead of 1 pixel wide... uh, oh... what happens when you "upconvert" an image to a resolution which doesn't neatly correspond to a multiple of the original image?

This is where the wonderful world of "scaling" comes in. 2 pixels can't display 1.6 pixels worth of information. They can display 0, 1, or 2 pixels. Those are the only options. It's like a Lite-Brite. There are only so many holes to punch those pegs into, see? So the scaler needs to do what your childhood brain does when you try to render a picture into a Lite-Brite: decide which lines can be lost and which ones can be stretched to average out into a picture which looks just as real to your brain as the original. (Of course, Lite-Brite pictures never look that real... but that's just because the resolution is so crappy! ;-) It involves lots of math and circuitboards, but essentially, your 720p LCD screen scales the 480p image from a DVD to fit the resolution of the screen., deciding which lines to add and lose to aberage out into a picture which looks to your brain identical to the 480p image.

But you only get what you pay for, right? Some scalers are better than others. Usually, though not always, the more expensive the TV you bought, the better scaler it has on board. Some TVs present a picture which seems to be swimming with jagged lines or "shimmering" - because it is making poor choices of which lines to add or drop. Better TVs make better choices, presenting you with a smooth, uniform image that delivers on detail but doesn't swim with extra noise.

THIS IS WHAT AN "UPSCALING" DVD PLAYER CAN DO FOR YOU. If you have a cheaper TV, it may well be that a DVD player with its own scaler will do a better job converting a 480p dvd image into a 720p or 1080p one. It will not ADD detail to an image. It will REDUCE unwanted "false information" from the image. It will make better choices as far as which lines to add or drop when converting the image. ALL TELEVISIONS AT 720P OR ABOVE "UPSCALE" OR "UPCONVERT" EVERY IMAGE FED INTO THEM. You do not need a new DVD player to do this. The question is simply whether a DVD player can do it better than your TV.

High definition images have 921,600 or 2,073,600 pixels in them. People who claim that they get an image which looks "just as good as HD" from a disc which has 345,600 pixels worth of information are either grossly misinformed, legally blind, or lying through their teeth.

The last option, for instance: during the whole Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD imbroglio, "upconverting" was being sold to the average consumer as a good alternative to upgrading to a new format. Oddly enough, most of these recommendations were being proselytized by the HD-DVD camp, in an effort to prevent people from buying Blu-Ray players, and likely in an attempt to get them to avoid HD disc adoption altogether, in preference for future digital download formats. Turns out, Microsoft was behind the "proselytizing effort," and its notoriously soft support for HD-DVD was seen by many (including me) as an attempt to prolong the format war, weakening both formats in advance of its own digital downloads.

Another thing to realize in the claim "just as good as HD"... just as good as WHAT high definiton? The cable going into your TV is capable of relaying a certain maximum amount of information. Which do you think has more information - an image with 345,600 pixels, or an image with 921,600 pixels? That's right, the higher one. So if you decide that of your 100 channels, you're going to switch 50 of them to 921,600 pixels, what are you left with? A bandwidth crunch. The coaxial cable can only push through a certain amount of data. When you reach that physical limit, something has to give. Some times, it's going to be that standard definition channels - heck, since they didn't look that good anyway, who cares if they look a teeny bit worse? Let's just send an image at VHS resolution, 158,400 pixels. Great! But the bandwidth savings there aren't as big as the savings in reducing the quality of high definition signals... what if you were to compress a 2,073,600 pixel signal down to, say, 800,000 pixels? That's a big savings in bandwidth. And it still looks "better" than a 345,600 pixel image, so great, everyone's happy. Most consumers won't be able to tell the difference, right?

Except we can, if we have the facts, and we have things to compare the crappy, compressed-to-shit images on cable services like Comcast and DirecTV to. Like Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray discs have a lot of storage space, and connections with precisely the amount of bandwidth necessary to display a 1080p image in perfect clarity and detail.

Look, I own an "upconverting" player, the Oppo DV971H. I think it's a fantastic player, and I do indeed have it set to scale from 480p to 1080i. Why? Because I think its onboard scaler does a slightly better job than the scaler in my Sony SXRD set. But I don't think that a DVD on it, let's say "The Prestige," looks better than a Blu-Ray of the same movie played on my Playstation 3. I've compared the two side by side (much to my girlfriend's chagrin...). There's a difference. It's not "near" anything. It's as good as a DVD will look on my setup, and I'm glad for it. But the Blu-Ray is WAY clearer and sharper, and has deeper colors, better blacks, and punchier sound to boot.

So please, please, please... don't go around saying that your "upconverting" player gives you a "near-HD" image. What your upconverting player is doing instead is giving you a near-480p image! If you had a 720x480 digital display, and a player which mapped the disc pixel to pixel, you'd have the best possible image from your DVD. But there are only ever 345,600 pixels of information. Blowing than number of pixels up to 2,073,600 does not increase the amount of information - indeed, it may end up losing information because of inadequate scaling from one size to another, since the multiple of the size is not a round number. An "upscaler" might blow the image up better than your TV, it might not. But the best it can possibly do is render the image in all its 480p glory and clarity. It will never look 720p, 1080p, or any number inbetween. And in all likelihood, it will look less than 480p.

My Top 25 Video Games of All Time

2008-05-20T10:40:00.000-07:00

Like many in my generation, I grew up with video games. I had seen and fiddled with Pong, the Fairchild Channel F, and various arcade games as early as age 5. But Video Gaming as a lifelong obsession began when my parents got me an Atari 2600. I was never the most athletic kid, and maybe video games had something to do with that (though I played a lot outside, riding my bike, in sandboxes, etc.), but video games provided me, a kid who wasn't going to excel in little league, with a world of excitement and imagination which was a great complement to my books, my legos, and my drawings. It added a technological element to the pursuit of fun which you can't really find otherwise. It was something both a solitary player and a group of friends could do.

My parents bought the family an Apple IIc (the "c" is for compact... hah!) personal computer in about 1984. And while typing and such were things that were pursued, gaming encroached on that machine, too. Then, the waiting began. When, oh when, would my parents finally consent to upgrade us into the true technological marvel of the 1980's, the Nintendo Entertainment System? One of my other backward friends and I clung to our Atari 2600's, jealously espying our more "fortunate" friends who were loading up with the NES greats. It must have been 6th grade before I was finally blessed by the presence of Super Mario, Link, Samus, and the rest. And by then, of course, we also had an IBM PC (as they used to call them) which ran DOS, then Windows 3.1, and eventually (gasp!) Windows 95. I skipped the 16 bit and 32 bit generations of console systems because of the PC, and portables like Gameboy, too. The PC was enough for me. I eventually bought a PS2 for myself in no small part to have a DVD player, and since then, have had a Dreamcast, Xbox, Gamecube, Xbox 360, and PS3.

So my path through video gaming, though by no means outrageously different, is individual, as is anyone else's. When I reminisce over my absolute favorite games, these reminisces are colored by what I had, what I was exposed to. So if I were to compile a list (Of COURSE I will compile a list!), it would have curious gaps and emphases.

So without further ado, here are my personal top 25 games of all time:

25. Microsoft Golf

I played this game to death during my last year of high school and my first year of college. It's a simple little thing, with rudimentary pseudo 3-D representations of golf courses, and what may be the first click interface in a golf game (though NES Open Tournament Golf may have it beat). I would put in a tape (!) of "Pretty Hate Machine" on the stereo in our computer room, and rock out while perfecting my score on Torrey Pines. It was a nice escape from the drudgery and general evil of high school cliques, and my lovelorn first year of college. Apparently, this is a singular obsession. I can't find a good, descriptive link to provide you with!

24. Karateka

This is one of the games that first blew my mind as to what a personal computer could do over and above a home console. I first played it in computer camp (yeah, I know) in 3rd grade. As far as action games go, I had played only Atari games before this one. The graphics, animation, the music, the storyline, it was just leaps and bounds above what I had experienced before. I don't think I had ever experienced that kind of tension in a game, such as when that mother-f$%^&-ing bird killed me over and over, or when I finally exploded the damn beast and beat Akuma. I also don't think I've ever been as shocked as when I approached Princess Mariko in a fighting stance by accident...

23. Missile Command

I experienced this on the Atari 2600, though there is a version with a track ball in the arcades. Nonetheless, I was freaked out by it. I knew what the game represented in the early 80s, when I was mortified by the prospect of nuclear war and scared nightly by the evil, malevolent face of Ronald Reagan on the TV news. Freaked out though I may have been, though, the game kept me coming back for more. It's definitely one of those "in the zone" games, where some part of your brain turns off while others are sharpened to a fine point. The trippy changing color schemes were also nifty, in my book.

22. Wolfenstein 3D

Seeing Karateka for the first time was what seeing Wolf3D was like. Mind blowing. It's charmingly quaint, now, but blasting Nazis in "3-d" corridors, getting attacked facially by evil dogs, exploring rooms, not knowing what lay behind each door, this was a new experience. It laid the groundwork for the whole FPS genre, which I promptly said a big "meh" to. Once you get over that initial rush of the new and different, you see them all as Wolf3D clones. At least I did.

21. Qix

I never played this game in the arcade or on a console. I discovered it in emulation a few years ago. Which, to me, is the best argument for it. The works of artists and craftsmen which otherwise would go forgotten can be enjoyed and appreciated anew by future generations. Damn, this is a fun game. It's so simple, almost like abstract art in a way. Subdivide the field to control it. Kind of like Tron mixed with Go. I can't recommend it enough if you have a MAME emulation program.

20. Taipan!

My other great Apple IIc obsession... this game is essentially a number generator with a threadbare story. You are an Asian sea-captain who wants to build a financial empire from your first borrowed ship. The dastardly moneylender Li Yuen will loan you some scratch to do it, but boy, when the debt piles up, he sends fleets of ships after you. Better upgrade those guns, buy some opium low and sell it high to keep the coffers full, and hope you can outrun that fleet of 150 ships! Brain-bustingly addictive, even though it is beyond simplistic.

19. Ikaruga

I think it's fair to say that a lot of boys who spent their formative years in a certain part of the 70's and 80's love space shooters. We grew up on Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica (the cheesy one), and The Last Starfighter. So to play a game that captures that sci-fi feeling and mixes in zen-like "in the zone" gameplay is a treat beyond compare. Ikaruga is possibly the greatest refinement of the space shooter formula - you against a horde of enemy spaceships, saving something or other, one hit and you're kablooey. Ikaruga switches things up, literally, by having you change colors to absorb enemy fire. The patterns created are brain-bendingly mesmerizing.

18. Final Fantasy X

Japanese Role Playing Games can be an acquired taste. With their effeminate teenage boy protagonists, bizarre creatures and aesthetics, and sometimes punishing "grinding" style of level-up play, they can be a tough sell to adrenaline-addled American gamers. Final Fantasy X, however, found the right balance between the stylistic tropes of the genre and an engaging story, fun side games (the ballgames), and leveling up. This is still the only game in the series I've finished, though I'm working on 12, which is a great game in its own right.

17. Soul Calibur

Japanese fighting games, on the other hand, have never been very difficult for American gamers to sink their teeth into. The combination of ripped men, busty women, kicking serious ass, and beautiful backdrops, has not been a hard sell. Soul Calibur represents possibly the finest balance between a game which is easy to learn and hard to master, combined with incredibly fluid animation, pretty backgrounds, and great looking characters. When a game released on Dreamcast still looks good compared to today's best, you know you've got a technical marvel.

16. Frogger

I was introduced to this game on the 2600, but have played the arcade and Colecovision versions as well. This was a game which was so addictive, it infiltrated the way my friends and I played in the real world. We had a walkbridge to our elementary school which crossed a freeway. So we'd go to the bridge and "cross" it, having to "avoid" the passing cars. Were we dorks? The answer is... yes. Simple, elegant, arcade brilliance. Immortalized on Seinfeld, no less.

15. Knights of the Old Republic
When you start melding video gaming with other great nerd obsessions, you either create disasters which inspire the vituperative scorn of geeks everywhere, or you induce what is known, scientifically as "nerdgasm." KOTOR (as it is known) falls squarely into the second category. It does the nearly impossible: it created a character, not vehicle-based game out of the Star Wars intellectual property, it avoided the awful prequel plotline altogether even though it came out in 2003, and it kicked f#$%-ing A$$. You play an errant Jedi in the time of the ancient old republic, and you can decide to become good or evil, with portentous consequences for the galaxy. Customizing your costume and lightsaber only adds to the nerd-gastic possibilities.

14. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
If there were a property which might have the potential to incite nerdgasmic reactions if translated to video game that was any where near that of Star Wars, it would be Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, there just hasn't been a truly great LOTR game yet. But our consolation prize is Oblivion, which is LOTR in almost every respect but name. Customize your avatar from among several races, join a guild, and fight, live, learn, love in a hyper-detailed 3-dimensional world. This is one of the best games of the "current generation," whatever that means. Mainly, it means you need 3 ghz of processing power and lots of RAM to play it. Which, frankly, the best way to do in the current marketplace is on a home console like the PS3 or Xbox 360. Anyway, this game kicks some serious tookus. It really raises the bar for an interactive world, and makes the nerds among us salivate at the prospect of a game this powerful set in one of our favored geeky universes (I want Star Trek, myself...)

13. Ms. Pac-Man
Girls do it better. Was Ms. Pac-Man a blow for women's lib in the 1980s? I don't know. If anything, Centipede would be a better candidate. What I do know is that this game wipes the floor with the original Pac-Man any day. Sublimely addictive, with loads of color and variety, yet the same divinely simple gameplay as the original, this may be the ultimate "classic" arcade game out there to introduce a gamer of any taste to. I may have one or two which trump it for me personally, but the utter genius of design here cannot be denied. You go, girl!

12. Ico
Video games are known to incite certain emotions in players. Fright, tension, exhilaration in victory, ignominy in defeat. But love, caring, empathy? These are harder to come by in a universe of explosions and bludgeoning. Ico breaks the mold however, making your avatar an exiled boy who labors to save a mysterious, ethereal princess. Oh, geez, another princess story? Don't scoff. The subtle mechanisms of the controls, the gorgeous, dreamy graphics, and the way the characters interact will have you feeling for your companion in this game like no other game before. This game is a work of art, pure and simple. It excels visually, but it also creates art in a way that other media cannot, with interaction.

11. Tetris
Probably the most played video game, world wide, in history. Why? Simplicity. The blocks fall. You have to fit them into each other. This game takes a concept so simple that any child, from Albania to Zimbabwe, has experienced it in one way or another, and puts it on a screen. Addictive, infuriating, fun.

10. Crazy Taxi
Even if it were nothing else, this game would have the singular distinction of making the music of The Offspring palatable. But that's not all this driving game gem has to offer. It also has thumb blisters galore to offer. Because it is so soul-rendingly addictive that despite your bleeding, raw digits, pummeled into pulp by the notoriously unforgiving Dreamcast controller, you will still want to play "one... more... game..." You are a taxi driver. You have 60 seconds on your clock. Pick up fares in a pseudo San Fran, take them to Pizza Hut or Tower Records, among other destinations, and collect your fare while recharging your game clock. Simple, yes? Another great in the "easy to learn, difficult to master" category. Thank goodness it's on a home console though, because the quarters this would consume in an arcade would weigh down even the hardiest nerd specimen.

9. The Legend of Zelda
My first memory of this game was its color. Not the colors of the graphics, but of the cartridge. It was gold. GOLD! If there's a way to grab a ten year old's attention, that just might be it. What untold wonders would this bizarre, GOLDEN video game contain within? Well, thank goodness for Nintendo, it contained untold wonders aplenty. The amount of territory to cover, the obscurity of its clues, and the number of items to wield was just about mind-blowing. It controlled well, it looked great for its day, and it had in spades what few other games could compete in: wonder. You control Link, and guide him on his quest to reunite the pieces of the mythical tri-force, in order to destroy the evil Ganon. Shigeru Miyamoto may be best known for Mario, but damn, this dude knows his games. It's like being Shakespeare and Milton rolled into one. Creating two of the most enduring franchises ever is no mean feat, and it is well deserved. Zelda's gameplay stands up to this day, twenty years later.

8. Galaga

While I have a special place in my heart for the hot babe known as Ms. Pac-Man (even if she does have a kid...), this one reigns in my heart as the greatest arcade game ever. Why? Balance, Daniel-san. Namco took Galaxian, a fine game in its own right in the long line of Space Invaders clones, and improved everything about it, creating a supremely tuned top down space shooter which still sucks quarters out of pockets 25 years after its debut. It is faster, more difficult, and has more strategy (with the potential to "sacrifice" a ship only to win it back, creating a double-firing ship) than any other space shooter of its day. I'm of the opinion that this game represents the optimum balance between simplicity and complexity. Ikaruga and Gradius are great games, but Galaga did it both first and arguably did it better. This game created zones of focus and awareness that few other games can match. An absolute classic.

7. Super Mario Bros.

Speaking of absolute classics, how about these chops: a game which rescued an entire industry and whose title character has gone on to sell more games than any other. A game whose theme song will be burned into countless brains until their dying gasps. A game which redefined what was possible in video games. Super Mario Bros. was the game that blew the lid off my preconceptions (formed by the Atari 2600) of what video games could do. Seeing it at a friend's house for the first time, busting that first invisible block, descending down the pipes into the underworld, this was a down-the-rabbit-hole kind of experience. But let us not praise it for its place in history only - it is also a perfectly tuned gameplay masterpiece. The controls seem to melt away as you concentrate on your goal. You never fight the game, you fight the enemies the game presents you, and your own abilities to time jumps and reach goals. Future iterations of the series may have added things which are superior, but stripped down to their essentials, they are still Super Mario Bros. It is a perfect game, simple and deep, boundless in its ability to command attention and induce fun in its players.

6. Burnout 3: Takedown

This is where the list gets more rarefied, and more personal. How can Burnout 3 beat Super Mario Bros.? Blasphemy? Well, for one thing, the difference between a 7 and a 6 on a list like this is negligible. But also, it comes down to personal taste. I dig deep games with lots of options, that suck you into an altered brain state and addict you hopelessly, inspiring "just one more play..." And in that, Burnout beats Super Mario. This is a game, despite what the folks at Criterion Games would say, which was worlds ahead in quality of both its predecessors and its followers. It has the optimum balance between unlocking new cars, event types, graphics, and appeal for many players. Crash mode in particular is a standout - more a puzzle game than a racing one, Crash mode has you barrel into an intersection looking to cause the most monetary damage. Let me tell you, load up Crash mode in a room of the staunchest non-gamers, and see who can resist it. The racing is also hella-fun, with retina-searing velocities depicted on screen, excellent, twitchy tuning on the controls and on the cars, and a wonderful endorphin high earned upon a win (or a takedown, in which you smash a rival). If it weren't for sucky load times, this game would be perfect. Given its quality, the load times of a disc based system are excused.

5. Tie Fighter

Remember the rules of nerd-gasm? This one follows them all: Star Wars, technology, being awesome. It adds the extra cool element of letting you play for the bad guys, too. While I loved X-Wing, also for the DOS PC, Tie Fighter did everything that game did and did it better. Beyond its tight controls, great (for their day) graphics, interesting storyline, and sweet music, this game had something which could keep you glued to your seat even as you simply inspected enemy vessels or waited five minuted for an enemy ship to show up: atmosphere. It FEELS like being inside Star Wars. Nothing can beat that. As a side note, this game also had an unbelievably kick-butt 3-dimensional map utility which allowed you to see where ships were in 3-D space, and replay a mission from start to finish while analyzing your trajectory, weapons fired, etc. Wow. They don't make them like this any more.

4. Grand Theft Auto 3

After Super Mario Bros., could there ever be another game which so redefined the boundaries of video gaming? It seems unlikely. But quantum leaps happen now and again, and GTA3 represents one fo them. Formerly a top-down game of stealing and racing autos, the folks at Rockstar Games so improved its sequel that one wonders if alien influence is responsible, like Stonehenge, or the Pyramids. Migrating the game to a 3-d world, Rockstar creates an entire city for you to play in. And you don't just drive cars. You also walk around shoot things with dozens of weapons (in the car or out of it), you buy stuff, you pick up hookers, you play crazy taxi, you put out fires, you listen to one of a dozen radio stations with hours of content, you figure out whether you can fly an airplane into a baseball stadium. "Freedom" doesn't begin to describe the feeling a player got when he or she first experienced GTA3. And while its sequels have expanded those freedoms or improved graphics, music, and the like, the original quantum leap still stands as a great game to play on its own merits. Endlessly imitated but never equalled. Is there a higher accolade for a game to receive?

3. Metroid

As much as I think Super Mario and Zelda are spectacular, genre-defining games, Metroid is the one that really got me as a kid. I always liked science fiction, so its setting was perfect as a verdant field for my imaginings. The music, the black background, the persistent world with hidden rooms, out of reach doors, and exploration potential unrivalled at the time, all of these things had a profound effect on a young psyche. This game oozes atmosphere, is technically refined, fills the barest story outline with the imagination of the player, looks great, has amazing music, and is just simply the finest NES game, to my mind, ever. In an era before the Internet, a twisty, seemingly never-ending arrangement of paths defied the ability of a 10 or 11 year old to describe without lapsing into the kid-speak of the day: awesome, radical, cool, the superlatives just keep coming. My friend Joey Zappia and I played this game for untold hours, taking turns trying to reach a seemingly unreachable room, hoping against hope we had enough energy tanks to finally outwit the soul-draining Metroid monsters and take out the dreaded Mother Brain. And then, to top it off, once you beat the game, you realize that your character, Samus Aran, has been a GIRL the whole time? Woah, dude, total mind-f$%#!

2. Sim City 2000

Now we have arrived at the part of the list in which we transition from games which were great, which took up a lot of time, and get into games which sucked up on the order of 200+ hours total due to their sheer addictiveness, and inspired 6-hour at a time binges which last until the morning sun creeps over the horizon. For some people, the Grand Theft Auto series does this, for some it is a sports game like Madden NFL. But for me, it is this genre, the "god game." What does that say about me? I don't know (or don't want to know...). But what I can say with certainty is that these are the two games which I have to hide. There is an everpresent danger of them creeping back into my life and destroying relationships, schoolwork, hygiene, sleep. They're that good. Sim City 2000 places you in the role of city manager - a city manager who can erect or bulldoze any building, move roads, even raise and lower terrain, rechart rivers - as long as the budget permits. Sim City 2000 improved upon its predecessor Sim City Classic, by jazzing up its graphics from a nondescript top down perspective to an isometric faux-3d, by making the commercial model more complex (but not unweildy), and adding types of buildings and utilities that allow you to create truly sprawling megalopolises. You create sports teams and name them, lay zoos and parks and any number of cool structures. If a disaster strikes, and your city is big enough, a tiny superhero will even appear! (Danger... nerd-gasm alert...) So why SC2000 and not its sequels Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4? I've said it before and I'll say it again: balance. This time, not just balance of gameplay, but balance of performance. The other games, though they add some great improvements (and lose some, as well) and improve the graphics, do not truly innovate the formula, and run more unstably on an average PC because of their technological improvements (SC3000 is a close one to SC2K - it was tough to pick one). This game (and series of games) gets you to think on a macroeconomic scale, finely tuning your taxes and public services so that they achieve the best possible results. I think the game relies on a Laffer Curve theory of economics... but that is perhaps beside the point. The point is, this game is digital crack to the nth degree. It is perhaps eclipsed by only one other game in this respect...

1. Civilization 2

If there is a game which combines aspects that trump my love of urban planning, architecture and public policy, it is a game which stimulates my love of history, politics, science, technology, and the sweep of human events. Which is what Sid Meier's Civilization series is all about. Here is a game that starts you off in 6000 BC, at the helm of a group of nomads, founding your first city in the start of a great human project of creating and expanding a culture. Not only that, but the coolest way to "win" is to have your culture, usually around 2000 AD, design and launch a space ship to colonize nearby planets with! You research advances starting with agriculture and proceeding through atomic power, encourage artistic and creative expression, compete with other cultures around the globe to expand and dominate the world scene... it's just everything I wish I could do in real life, distilled into video game form. A humanist like myself is just tickled pink by a game which challenges the player to create the best society for its citizens. An addiction was sure to follow. And so it did... this is one of those games that I can start up, and ... whoops, how did 45 minutes just pass? Oh, no matter... wait, now it's 4 in the morning? It's sort of like delerium tremens for an alcoholic. Lost time, lost sleep, burning obsession. This is what video games can be. Try at your own risk, whether it be Civ 2 or any of its sequels. Civ 2 wins the prize for being the first in the series to add to complexity while keeping it manageable and easy to run on any PC. I've recently purchased Civ 4, though, so we'll just see which game is better in the end...

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So there we have it. 25 games, which I estimate I've logged a good 1300 hours with over my lifetime. It gets a little dizzying (and disgusting) when you chart that out. 56 days. 8 weeks. Eek. I'll just have to chalk it up to a recreational activity which lubricates and allows the other 30 odd years of existence to function efficiently and happily. Hmm. Yeah. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

**********

Honorable Mentions

Katamari Damacy

Na na, na na na na na naaaaahh..... Trippy Japanese weirdness at its finest. You are a cosmic prince, who must repopulate the cosmos after your father's drunken bender had destroyed countless stars and planets. How to do this, you ask? Why, by rolling a giant ball of garbage around the neighborhood and picking up thousands of pieces of flotsam, of course! Royal Rainbow!!!

Rez

Trippy Japanese weirdness part deux... this on-rails shooter with thumping techno beats features a story about helping a computerized consciousness evolve (or something), and features graphics ripped from Tron.

Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore

Brought boob physics to the forefront of gamer consciousness. But in addition was also a kick-ass fighting game with loads of unlockable costumes, sprawling, multi-tiered fighting stages, and great button-mashing gameplay.

Homeworld

A BSG-style story before BSG was cool again. Married to an awesome 3-D RTS framework. And amazing, ambient music. The manual wasa great read, too, written by real writers and filled with a fun sci-fi story.

Jedi Knight

All the nerdiness of Star Wars, all the back cramping FPS mouse and keyboard gameplay of Wolfenstein!

Utilitarian Technocrats Unite!

2008-05-08T09:24:00.000-07:00

I joined Facebook the other day. Yeah, yeah. It's all the rage with the kids these days. I am pretty appalled by how many photos and videos high school kids seem to post, and how often they seem to be on the site. But for old fogeys like me, it might actually be a useful way to find and keep in contact with people I don't see every day.

Well, when you create your profile, they ask you for your political views. Frankly, I was unsatisfied with the pre-fixed choices. So I typed in "Utilitarian Technocrat." Which, in a neat thing, you can click, and get a list of profiles with matching terms. Which, upon clicking mine, revealed none.

So it seems I am the founder of a new political party. Woo hoo! Which begs the question, of course, what is my platform?

Well, first, on the meaning of politics: while it's been said that politics is the "art of the possible," or, from a more Machiavellian angle, the "art of convincing others to do that which they wouldn't have otherwise," I prefer a more classical interpretation of the term. The Polis is the city, in which human beings have massed to their mutual benefit. Politics, then, is the art of maximizing the health and well-being of the polis.

Utilitarian has been taken broadly to mean "the greatest happiness for the greatest number." This is a very Benthamite or Epicurean reading, I prefer the more robust utilitarianism of a John Stuart Mill, in which the well-being of humans is taken into account, not simply a swinish happiness or pleasure. Humans should live as humans ought - exercising their best capacities, fluorishing and growing in an unfettered quest for self improvement and improvement of their Polis.

Technocracy has been termed the "rule by technicians." Techne is the Greek term meaning the art or craft of a thing. Well, it certainly seems reasonable to me to have decisions made by people who know the art or craft of a thing. Brain surgeons should perform brain surgery, and plumbers should install a bathtub. So while I agree with this, I would also like to expand its meaning to include the idea that technology, or the application of crafts, should be utilitzed to its fullest to maximize the ends stated above in the definition of utilitarianism.

What does this mean in terms of issue positions? Well, I am pro-choice, because currently living people's lives and happiness take precedence over not yet living ones, and forcing unwanted pregnancies upon people could very likely result in unhappy future citizens anyway. Correspondingly, I am pro contraception, for very similar reasons - plus, it's a technology, and technology=yay! I am for the genetic modification of foods. We've been doing it for 10,000 years, now we might be able to do it faster and better. Agriculture and cultivation have played possibly the greatest role in extending the human lifespan, and they are the key crafts necessary to continuing our run as the dominant, expanding species we are. Famine and strife are the inevitable results if we try to strip ourselves of the tools we have developed as a species to maximize our resources. This article on the coming banana crisis offers a good example. I am pro-nuclear power. I think that the burning of fossil fuels has developed into one of the biggest risks to continued human well-being both currently and over the next millenium. Nuclear power represents a zero-emission power source which has quite manageable waste products compared to fossil fuels. If and when solar or wind power becomes economically viable as a real option, I'll switch to that as my go-to power source. But currently, nuclear is our best option - it's only ignorance and fear that are holding us back, paradoxically enough, it is fear mongering by environmentalists which is preventing us from undoing the greatest environmental holocaust in human history.

So there is a good start on figuring out where my party stands on any given issue. Take the issue, examine what its consequences are for human well-being and development, and pick the best of the options. That's what Utilitarian Technocrats do. We're not bound by ideology, tribal god images, or any other silliness.

Basically, I want Star Trek. And I want it now!

5 Reasons it Sucks thet Rear Projection TV is Dying (and 2 that it makes sense)

2008-01-09T11:40:00.001-08:00

Well, the writing is on the wall for rear projection TV. Sony has announced that they are leaving the segment to focus on LCD and OLED flat panel televisions. Samsung has stated that they are re-examining their options in the segment, also. Rear projection, which filled a great market niche after resurrecting itself from its bulky CRT forebears, is going to be phased out by many if not all manufacturers in favor of flatter technologies.

Here then, are five reasons this stinks for you and me:

1. Cost per square inch. RPTV's can be had at screen sizes of up to 80 inches (70 is the more common highest size, Sony and JVC offer 70-inchers. Mitsubishi offered the 80 inch "diamond" DLP set.) for under $3,000. Sony offers its newest 60" Bravia SXRD set for $2199 MSRP. This means the street price can be expected to dip below $1800. That's astounding for a 60" 1080p set. By way of comparison, most 50-inch LCD panels will run you $3000, and if you can find a 60-inch or greater set, be prepared to shell out $8000 or more.

2. Picture Quality. Simply peruse the reviews at sites like CNET.com, Soundandvisionmag.com, and Hometheatermag.com. RPTV's consistently score higher that LCD flat panel sets, and their scores routinely equal those of Plasma displays. Sony, Samsung, Mitsubishi and JVC have all put out sets which have improved each year, bringing them to a performance level which is impossible to match in their price range, and equals the performance of higher priced options. Sony's recent A3000 SXRD sets have the highest ratings on CNET this year, and are praised for their extremely deep black level, color accuracy, brightness and detail. Will RPTV going away make for better quality in LCD panels? Umm, removing competition is usually not what drives improvement in products.

3. Size. Paradoxical, you say? These sets' size is often seen as their fatal drawback. For me, it's a plus. I have two rambunctious cats at home, and quite frankly, I am scared to death of blowing $3k on a television that rests on a slender little stand. RPTV sets are generally 12 to 15 inches deep - not space hogs by any means - but big enough to remain stable even in a 6.0 earthquake (or cat quake!). Also, though their footprint is bigger, these sets usually weigh in under 90 pounds, and can be as light as 60 pounds - which makes moving them loads easier. Most Plasmas can weigh into the 150-plus range, and LCD flat panels at higher sizes push 100 pounds. I've always felt, since most installations will require a cabinet for A/V components, that you really gain nothing in space by buying a flat panel set. It just rests on the same cabinet. Unless you put it on our wall, (which, at 100-pounds plus, is a scary proposition) and build an in-wall cabinet for components, you gain nothing in space and just spend more money.

4. User Replaceable Bulbs Another paradox? Many have decried the necessity of buying a $200-plus part for your TV every 3 or 4 years. I say, what's the problem? Plasma sets get dim after 8-10 years, and LCD flat panels can burn out their fluorescent backlights as well. In those cases, you have to buy a whole new set. RPTV, on the other hand, allows you to make your set essentially brand new with a simple light source replacement, which you can do yourself without costly service visits. Given the low cost of the sets themselves, adding in some bulbs which restore your set to a like-new picture still puts the cost-benefit equation on the happy side of par.

5. I already have one! Well, it sucks for me and anyone else who has already bought an RPTV, because, once companies drop these sets from production, this means they also stop producing replacement lamps, parts, and keeping their staff trained to service these sets. Boo. After the Sony announcement, I bought two lamps on eBay to prepare for just this eventuality. I wonder whether other RPTV owners will feel the same way. I also have a 4 year warranty with Abt Electronics, a store I can't recommend highly enough for their service, prices and friendliness. But if you bought from an online retailer or a lesser store (cough... Best Buy...), you might be left out to dry in terms of s future service call.

Clearly, I'm a fan of RPTV. But I can see some reasons why the market did not support this segment the way they are going ga-ga for flat panels:

1. Reliability. Deserved or not, RPTV has a reputation in internet circles as less reliable than flat panel sets. Some sites state that RPTVs are serviced at a rate approaching 20%
. I have had my set require a visit to replace a cooling fan. Not a huge deal, to be sure, and Abt Electronics' great service made it easy. But I suppose I've never had my LCD monitor need service, nor have I ever needed service for an old-style tube TV. "Microdisplay" RPTV such as DLP and SXRD sets are new on the market, only about 5 years in, and have loads of parts. The more complex and the newer anything is, the more likely it is to need a fix here and there.

2. Flat is IN. RPTV does not enjoy the "mind share" that flat panels do. RPTV doesn't enjoy the luxury that flat panels do, being featured in movies and television shows, portrayed as the pinnacle of luxury and sexiness. Athletes and rock stars deck their house out with flat panels when they make it big. Hobbyists put LCD screens into their "rides" to "pimp" them out. Regardless of the advantages of quality and price discussed above, most consumers do not really research their purchases. They go with brand names and cultural cachet. Cachet is squarely in the corner of flat panels right now.

All in all, I find it to be a sad thing that such an exciting and affordable television technology is going the way of the dodo. The more options we have as consumers, the better. Competition drives prices downward and quality up. Hopefully, the TV market will have enough competition within it to remain vital. OLED is exciting, and hopefully can be gotten into a marketable position soon, to challenge LCD and Plasma.

Until then, I'll watch my RPTV and know that I've got a kick ass set for a low price.

Dispatches from the frontline of the "console war"

2007-07-24T22:30:00.000-07:00

There's almost nothing gamer fanboys love more than railing against the video game system they did not choose to buy and jingoistically defending their choice of purchase. Generally, these people are idiots.

I, on the other hand, am not an idiot, nor am I a fanboy. I happen to own an Xbox360 and a PS3. I purchased the 360 because I had several original Xbox games I wanted to finish, and I recently purchased a PS3 because I wanted a Blu-Ray player for my super-spectacular HDTV. I have not purchased a Wii because I already own a Gamecube and don't really see a lot of games begging for me to play them just now (and, given the console's apparent popularity, I wouldn't be able to find one if I tried.) I have, however, played it at friends' homes and my sister owns one, so I am not inexperienced in all things Wii.

So here's my take on the current "console war."

First off, I don't see why a "war" is necessary. The video game market is expanding, as are the incomes of the generational cohort (mine) that grew up with video games as a primary means of entertainment. Many of us own 2 or more of the choices out there. And even if we didn't all own multiple systems, there are enough consumers around the world to purchase, say, 30-50 million of each brand. While that is far short of the PS2's 115-million worldwide sales mark, it seems like more than enough to build a profitable hardware and software sales business (As of right now, the 360 has sold 10 million since 11/22/05, the Wii 9 million since 11/19/06, and the PS3 about 4 million since 11/11/06).

My predictions for console sales when all is said and done are: Xbox360-40 million; Wii-50 million; PS3-60 million. Here are my reasons:

-As far as the Xbox goes, I'd imagine a lifespan of 4-5 years from today for the console. I don't think sales will spike at any given time, outside of periodic price drops. Microsoft's recent woes with warranty issues will slow sales over the next year until they finally come clean with a good explanation for their high failure rates. They do, however, have strong software support and a well developed online content delivery system. Sales should steady and stay even throughout the projected life of the system.

-The Wii will probably last a bit longer on the market, maybe 5-6 years. I think Nintendo is banking on their formidable software library from 1980-present and their "Virtual Console" store. They don't seem as interested in driving hardware improvement, given their lack of HDTV support and next-gen DVD capability. On the other hand, if Nintendo captures the "casual" market as they did with their GBA and DS businesses, they could move 75-100 million Wiis. I doubt it though - I just don't see a rash of compelling software which can ONLY be done on the Wii sustaining itself for 5 years. I see sales topping out after the initial buzz/fad stage wears off this Christmas, and going on a slow, steady burn from there on forward.

- Sony is in it for the long haul with the PS3, I think, and this is why, though sales will not eclipse the yearly marks of the other consoles for a year or two, they will likely tally the most when all is said and done. They have stated a 10-year lifespan for the console - quite a bit, compared to past systems (although the NES and PS2 come close.) Sony has the resources and the brand name power to do it - especially if they get hardware down to $300, push Blu-Ray to a competitive level (i.e. Blu-Ray discs which cost the same as Standard DVD), and have a big glut of quality gaming content. I think the chances of at least 2 of these 3 are quite good, and so, despite an initial slow sales build, Sony will start pumping consoles out into the market and get software into the hands of their users.

All told, I do not think there will be a PS2 of this generation (i.e. a console which doubles the competitions' sales combined). And frankly, I think this can be a good thing for the consumer. When you have three systems with competitive install bases, manufacturers will try their darnedest to create and add value to their product in order to lure consumers. Price drops, pack ins, upgrades, etc. A consumer who buys one console will not have to worry that their system will dwindle and die with a whimper (Such as the wonderful Dreamcast, and even Gamecube arguably). Third party developers may put out fewer games total, but they will be distributed more evenly, and, given the smaller numbers and the online demo capability f all three systems, they will probably be of higher quality in general.

So let's declare a cease fire in the console war. The New World Order of the seventh console generation looks pretty nice to these eyes.

What I've Learned About Buying an HDTV

2007-07-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

I just finished my degree recently. To celebrate, my parents bought me (well, went halfway on, anyway) a new HD television to replace the one I lost in the fire. It is the Sony KDS-50A2000, their entry level "SXRD" set (which makes it their least expensive top of the line set). Now, I had known what sort of television I wanted for many moons before this, but a lot of people are just lost in the woods when it comes to stuff like this. Since everyone comes to me with questions about it, why not "blog" about it, as the kids are wont to do nowadays?

Why HD?

OK. First things first. Why HD? I get this question a lot from people who have never seen an HDTV in action. Usually old codgers who've had their GE color set from 1972 in the living room ever since, slowly degrading, inspiring visits to the optometrist, convincing them that all those Hollywood stars wear green makeup for some reason.

Let's try and put it simply. Have you ever seen a copy from a mimeograph? You know, the sort of purple ink "ditto" sheets you might have gotten if you attended school in the 80's. The letters are kind of blurry, the sheets might be warped from the wet copy process, and they have a distinct odor. Now, have you ever seen a sheet from a good laser printer? Crisp, bright paper, not dulled by wet copying, the letters so clean and distinct that they practically read themselves. That's kind of like the difference between Standard Definition (SD) and High Definition (HD) television. Or maybe, for you visually impaired types out there, think about the difference between having your glasses off and having them on. Between a polaroid and a digital camera. Between the top of the upper deck and seats behind the plate.

Go to a bar and check out the clarity on sports. Go to a friend's house and watch a movie. Really give it a look. It's clearly superior, with every type of programming. Once you've whetted your appetite, get ready to do a little bit of research and planning.

Stage 1: Learn Before You Buy

Once you're set on getting an HDTV, it's time to answer a few questions:

What will I watch most?

This is important insofar as the "level" of set that you're going to want to shoot for. Not all HDTV's are created equal - but that's OK, because most people have different expectations. My Grandmother, for instance, was impressed by my parents' Samsung DLP rear projection set over this last holiday because it was nice and big, and provided a very clear picture for things like Jeopardy, daily soap operas, and the news. But this is all she'd likely watch - she doesn't own more than one or two DVDs, and doesn't follow sports to any large degree. Now for myself, on the other hand, I have a ton of DVDs, follow Baseball religiously, watch a bit of network TV, and have a couple of video game systems. Our needs will be correspondingly different.

How much of a stickler am I for quality?

This question relates to the first. My grandmother doesn't have the greatest eyesight. I, on the other hand, have 20/20 vision. Since I am also a connoisseur of movies, picture quality is of particular interest to me. My grandma just wants it to be big, bright and clear. So the question for the connoisseur is: what makes a great picture?

In my online reading and personal experience with various sets, I think "home theater" picture quality boils down to these essentials, in descending order of importance:
1. Contrast/Black level
2. Color fidelity
3. Resolution
4. Image processing

A deep black is essential to giving the illusion of reality to an image. When we see shadows in the real world, they're not washed out gray fields in our view. We see blackness, nothing. Things which are in the shadow, to the extent that they're visible, subtly reflect just a tad more light than the baseline darkness of the shadow. This is what we should look for in our display - both the darkest rock-bottom black we can find, as well as the ability to distinguish things just above black in an easy, realistic manner.

Color is another obvious element to a great image. We've all seen an old tube TV with green faces or purple sky. Doesn't look real, does it? The ability of a display to render vibrant, convincing colors which closely approximate reality is key. Flesh tones are especially important - if everyone looks like they've just driven 300 miles in a convertible, something is wrong.

Resolution is important inasmuch as you can actually discern it. If you're sitting less than a foot away from a 27" tube set, you know what I mean - you can see every pixel in the image, it looks like a big jumble of lighted blocks. If you're sitting 15 feet away, the image will look clear, but it will be tiny. Finding a resolution suited to your viewing environment is important. When you do it right, and hit the sweet spot of resolution for viewing distance, you're in for a treat. You've seen youtube videos, right? Pretty crappy resolution, especially when you're likely 2 feet from your monitor. But boy oh boy, when you see a high resolution image from the right distance, it's like being there (given the previous two elements of a great image being in place).

Image processing is a concept that escapes most people, until you show it to them in direct comparison/contrast examples. But it has a profound effect. "Sharpness" is the type of processing most are familiar with. The Sharpness control, used improperly, can ruin a picture by putting little white halos around every object on screen. Different companies have a panoply of processing schemes, such as Sony's "Digital Reality Creation (DRC)", Samsung's "DNiE (dynamic image enhancement)", among others. Many of these schemes can wildly influence picture quality - making things either a mushy mess or a jittery, jagged, mess of over-enhanced lines.

Where will I put the TV?

A lot of people salivate over "flat panel" televisions mounted on the wall. Plasma and LCD sets look sexy, to be sure, but it's worth considering your other options for a few reasons. Rear projection models such as DLP and LCOS can usually be had for half the price at larger sizes. While they are generally 10 to 15 inches deep, as opposed to the 4 or 5 inches of a flat panel, they usually offer comparable or better performance at a lower price. Additionally, since we all have cable boxes, DVD players, and video game systems to place within cords' reach of the set, usually an entertainment center cabinet is still the best option for placement of the set. So if you have a cabinet that's 24 inches deep in your living room anyway, what's the real benefit of the flat panel set?

Don't get me wrong, Plasma and LCD sets can look great, and certainly have the "ooh" and "aah" factor. But I think the reap projection sets on the market offer great value and performance, and don't take up any more room, given the need of placing AV equipment in cabinets (if you're pondering expensive "in-wall" installation, you're probably not reading this!).

Another thing to consider is the lighting of your "television room." Do you want your set in a bright living room with limited control of sunlight? Then you need to consider reflections which can obscure your line of sight. Most plasma sets, for instance, are equipped with a shiny, reflective screen coating, which reflects any ambient sunlight or room lighting back at you. It doesn't pay to watch only 60% of a $2500 set. Consider placement of such a TV in a darker room or one with heavy curtains, or pointing away from the incoming light.

Sound is something many ignore - but the best movie and television programming are usually encoded with 5.1 to 7.1 channel surround sound. If you want the full experience, you may want to consider a room where you can place or mount several speakers at relatively even distances from your TV. A nice rectangular room is usually good for this. There are many inexpensive home theater "in a box" systems that will provide you with all the speakers you need.

How much am I willing to spend?

This is the question that can dictate what kind of set you get. If you want to spend $1000 or less, you're either relegated to a lower-end LCD panel at a smaller size, or the best bargain on a DLP set you can find if you want something bigger. If you're budgeting up to $2000, you can find a lot of great sets. 42" LCD and Plasma sets can be found in this range, though generally in 720p flavors. 1080p Rear-pro sets can be found in this bracket at sizes up to 60". If you want 50" or more from a flat panel, $2500 and up is what you'll be spending.

Of course prices keep trending downward over time, so things constantly change. This can also lead to the "oooh, price drop!" buyer's remorse every summer. Well, you just need to accept that prices drop. Shop for the best discount you can get, be sure to pricematch big box retailers with "certified" online retailers such as vanns.com and amazon. Retailers will usually match the lowest legitimate price you can find on a set, and sometimes will kick in a little extra discount to undersell the competitor.

A note on cables: DO NOT BUY MONSTER CABLE! Monster brand products are severely overpriced and do not offer any appreciable performance benefit over less expensive "house brands." This is especially true in the area of digital cables - digital means that a signal is all encoded as 1's and 0's. As long as it gets to the set from the source, it will be a perfect image transfer, no matter what. All the "Gas injection" and "gold shielding" in the world doesn't alter whether a cable actually gets the signal there or not.

How will I get my content delivered to me?

Once you've seen enough HD to convince yourself that you want it, that it's worth it, the question is, what will you feed your new set? You need to explore the options available to you in your area.

-Most of us have access to a cable provider who has added some HD programming of late. Here, it's Comcast. They offer a "digital" cable service, and charge an extra $5 to $10 for "adding" HD channels. Personally, I think the extra fee is a ripoff, but, you can get a DVR cable box in the deal, which records your scheduled programming a la "Tivo" so you can watch it whenever you please. Most cable providers offera rudimentary HD lineup, with ESPN, your local sports cable station, Discovery, TNT, an HD startup channel such as INHD, and local HD broadcast stations.

-Satellite services are currently in hot competition with each other to outdo the other's HD offerings. DirecTV and Dish Network are scrambling to add HD channels to their lineups. Both companies currently offer 20 or so channels, and look to add up to 100 apiece by next year. If your local cable service kind of stinks or is too pricey, or you just have a bad relationship with them, it can really pay to get a dish service. They offer local HD stations (though there can be some exceptions,) everything cable offers, and usually newer cable stations that have gone digital such as National Geographic, TLC, Food, SciFi, and the like.

-If you're on a budget, but still want a fair amount of HD programming to complement your DVD or gaming with your new toy, an antenna is worthy of consideration. Back in olden times, people put rabbit ears or aerial antennas to tune in local broadcasts. Well, those days are back, because Federal mandates have required local stations to broadcast in HD for some time now. I personally own this model, an indoor/outdoor variety that pulls in most channels quite well. Traditional antennas that you still see on rooftops work as well. These will pull in whatever channels are over the air in your area. If you're near a big city, this will usually include CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, and a few other local HD stations such as WGN, CW, and the like. You can expect 10-20 channels with big networks and their various digital offshoots. Quality is usually a bit better than Cable or Dish, as well, since those services need to compress their signals to fit within their channel lineups and the bandwidth of coaxial cable. But you won't get your cable HD stations, such as ESPN, Discovery, etc.

Stage 2: Buying and Setting up

You need to set a target for what brand and model you want before you go to any stores. You do NOT want an employee who works on commission to recommend a set to you. I recommend you take your budget and look at reviews for sets within that price range. Cnet.com has useful reviews and summaries for sets which can be sorted by price. Other useful review sites are Sound and Vision and Home Theater Magazine.

720p v. 1080p

There are a lot of buzzwords floating around trying to sell various types of televisions. True HD, Full HD, blah blah blah. What you need to know is that there are two choices of resolution you can choose for your set. 1080p describes a picture composed of 1920 x 1080 pixels. 720p is a picture composed of 1280 x 720 pixels. One has a higher resolution. It's just that simple. (By way of comparison, Standard Definition TV has 640x480 pixels.) High Definition broadcasts are either in 720p or 1080i. Either type of set will display either signal. In theory, a 1080p set will show you more detail from a 1080i signal, but in practice the difference is slight, owing to the fact that most cable/dish companies don't give you a tremendously great signal to begin with. A 1080p set will certainly give you a better Blu-Ray or HD-DVD picture, since they are natively 1080p at a high quality level of compression. (More on Blu-Ray/HD-DVD later.)

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Well, that's a start. I'll update this as I think of new things to offer you, gentle readers. Until then, enjoy your HD experience! It can be a fun project for a tech-inclined person, and a good learning experience for the non-tech-savvy.

Turkey Sandwich, and the Closing of an Institution

2007-06-05T10:24:00.000-07:00

There's an early Halloween episode of the Simpsons in which Homer uses a monkey's paw, which grants him three wishes, to request a turkey sandwich. For him, there was an ironic twist - the turkey turned out to be a little dry. But for my part, I can understand where he was coming from, just a little bit, with his inhuman craving. I got just such a craving today.

I used to live in Lincoln Square. There is a wonderful deli there, which is now closing, called Meyer's Delicatessen. I can't tell you how sad this makes me. Not only is it the prototypical small neighborhood establishment, but it has a tremendously beautiful vintage neon sign and is about the German-est place you will find in Chicago, tied with the Brauhaus, a few doors down. They sold the most wonderful horseradish and sweet/hot mustard there, and good roast turkey, hearty fresh baked bread, Wisconsin Muenster cheese, the only thing they lack is greens, which had to be purchased at Jewel, six blocks away. My preference was spinach.

The marriage of these ingredients is the most delectable turkey sandwich possible. The interplay of savory and sweet flavors with the turkey and mustard, the creaminess of Muenster cheese, the crisp burst of fresh cellulose in the greens, and the oaty, chewy bread, lightly toasted on the outside, was just heavenly. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say, at least for me, it's a sandwich that outclasses any restaurant offering out there (which are usually overstuffed beyond any practicality, and drizzled with some messy goo or another). It is portable, perfectly balanced, filling, satisfying on some Teutonic level, nourishing the body and the soul.

Well, I no longer live there. But the sandwich can live on. I've been working at a condo building, biding my time until I start grad school. There is a Dominicks nearby, and today, on a crisp, somewhat chilly day in June, I got the urge. The Craving. The Need For One Of My Turkey Sandwiches.

While the ingredients are not the same, I was able to approximate it. I just finished eating it, and it was good. I am nourished.

I used one slice of Sargento deli-style Muenster cheese, which is from Wisconsin, so not too bad. The mustard was Silver Spring Sweet'n Hot Honey Mustard, and I must say it was none too shabby. I squeezed a fine portion on each slice of bread, probably between 1-2 tbsp. Hey, what do you know, it's from WI, too. The bread was Brownberry Whole Grain Classic Oat Nut variety. I used an end piece, since it's a fresh loaf. Looks like Brownberry is made in PA. The Turkey was the Safeway brand, "Butcher's Cut." Lord knows where it's from, besides a poor dead bird. It was very thinly sliced, which was good, but a wee salty for my tastes. I used 2 ounces of 10 in the package, I would estimate. The spinach was Fresh Express Spinach, a pre-washed bagged variety, with baby-ish spinach. They are located in CA. I would say I put 12-15 leaves of baby spinach, divided between each slice of bread, affixed by the mustard. So the cross section is:

Bread
Mustard
Spinach
Cheese
Turkey
Spinach
Mustard
Bread

5 simple ingredients, one f-ing awesome sandwich. I don't have a toaster oven in the office, which could have put a bit of a toast on the bread and melted the cheese a tad, but doggone it, it was pretty darned good nonetheless. Plus, minus ingredients like mayo, pretty healthy. The turkey had a fair amount of salt, but the cheese wasn't bad at all (you should see the Sodium levels on McDonald's cheese!), and the rest of the ingredients are all healthy. Given the serving size:

-400 calories
-11 g fat, 4 of which are saturated.
-1365 mg sodium, a little on the high side, about 57% of the USRDA. Most of it was the turkey and the bread. Next time, I'll try to locate a source for fresh poultry.

Sapere Aude!

2007-05-01T08:15:00.000-07:00

One of the wonderful, miraculous things about being a child is having parents. They stride, god-like, through our lives, providing for our needs, salving our wounds, and absolving our guilt.

It is on guilt that I am ruminating today. When we do bad, we screw up, we hurt another. I can remember a few doozies from my own childhood. For instance, I cheated on my reading workbook in 5th grade. I could have very easily done the work and gotten 100's across the board. Reading in 5th grade was not terribly challenging to me. Maybe that's why I said "screw it!" as a ten-year old, and figured that reading off phony scores to the teacher (we were on the honor system) was just as useful. I was a little snot, some times. Eventually of course, my teacher (who I liked a great deal, and who liked me, as well) found out, and I had to be punished (lightly) for my misdeeds.

Whatever punishment that was doled out was insignificant in comparison to the guilt that I felt. I had hurt someone I cared about, I had received a stinging social rebuke, and I was embarrassed beyond belief. I remember that I became physically ill in the days that followed. I got an ear infection, which I had never had before. For a good week thereafter, I was in a state of absolute mortification. As depressed as a ten-year old gets.

But eventually, the healing light of a loving parent can begin to wash away that stain, to make a child feel whole again. Someone loves me, you say, even though I've made such an error. Someone exists to forgive me. I don't know that there is as warm and secure a feeling any where else in life. We are socialized into these schemes of symbol and value (grades, laws, morals), schemes that we will always fail in one way or another to adhere to. To have that fallback seems necessary, or we might just die from grief and pain for our transgressions.

***************

Of course, we all grow older, and our parents become farther away, grow old themselves, and die. We still make our mistakes and commit our sins. Probably more so as we age and graduate into systems of greater complexity, and greater potential pitfalls. Let's say we cheat on a spouse, or betray a friend. Who can forgive us in that same magical way, with that healing light of unconditional love? No one, of course. Love outside of the parent-child bond is inherently conditional. We choose it, and we can choose to set it aside. No wife or friend or coworker can ever absolve us in the way we so desperately seek. There is a hole in our lives, and most of us strive to fill it in any way we can.

Is it any wonder, then, that when society tells us that there is an invisible giant in the sky who loves us no matter what we do, that so many people accept it, even if they suspect a fair amount of bunk in the message?

Here is the uber-symbol, the one that replaces something in our deepest areas of need, who supersedes all of the symbols that we transgress or fail to live up to in our social lives as human beings. Pray to me, he whispers. Ask me for absolution, and I will grant it.

But we cannot escape the nagging fear. Did he create us out of his love, or did we create him out of our need? If it is simply our parents who created us (and the simplest explanation is usually the correct one), and our parents are gone, who will make everything okay? Who will tell us that it all means something? And given that meaning, who will forgive us?

But the invisible giant in the sky doesn't answer. He never helps. He never gives us any indication that he is actually there. People who collect money from us tell us that he is there, he is listening, he did create the universe, and that it, our lives, and our deaths have meaning - so please donate to the invisible giant's house on Earth. And we want to believe, so we write the check every week to the Catholic church, or tithe to Islam, or take the Bridge of Scientology. It's all equally daft, and all prey equally upon the weaknesses of men and women the world over.

***********

Our greatest sins tend to occur either in the invisible giant's name, or when that other of our created symbolic structures rules our lives and actions - nationhood. Many times inextricably linked with the symbol of God, the symbol of Nation offers a similar solace to its dirty, dying, rotting meat-bag constituents. You may die, but the Nation will be eternal. Your children and their children will inherit the glory of the Nation which you have helped to create and maintain. Your life has meaning. Your death, in the best of all possible worlds, will have meaning, too. Pay your taxes. Join the Army. Give your life for something greater, and we guarantee not only a portion of cosmic significance to you, but a tidy pension to to your spouse, as well (fine print: as long as they are of the opposite gender, and the union has been sanctified by the other great symbolic authority in our lives.)

The individual sins of men pale in scope to the sins of men acting as Nations. Lebensraum. Five Year Plans. Killing Fields. "Wars on Terror." Some nations act under the rubric of a god figure, some eschew that but laud the equally sacred (and equally illusory) "spirit" of their nation. They are all the actions of tribes who wish to assert their dominance and their greater cosmic significance over other tribes.

You blew up our buildings? Yeah, well, Fuck You, we'll blow up two countries. Take that. Our Dad has a better job than your Dad, and we're immortal, while you're not. Nyah nyah nyah.

**********

The larger the sin, the more yearning for forgiveness. When the ranks of soldiers killing in the name of their Nations swell, so too do the lines at churches, begging for absolution. Somehow, call it a moral instinct, call it an inclination, even absent the Cosmic Father to dole out morality, we still know it's wrong. There's just some sort of empathic drive in all (or most) of us - as Hume put it: would you just as soon step on a man's gouty toes, as walk around them to avoid causing him undue pain? Most of us would avoid them. Those who do not avoid stepping on their fellow humans' toes are sociopaths, or people who have been convinced by a purportedly greater symbolic authority that causing pain to others is right and good in this particular instance (i.e. Republicans.)

And so it goes, as Vonnegut was fond of saying (If there were a God, I'd ask for Him to rest Kurt's soul - as it is, I'll just say he'll be missed), we engage in all sorts of moral gymnastics to attempt to convince ourselves that this immorality is in fact the reverse, that our victims deserve it, that Our Nation and Our God demands it of us. And millions, hundreds of millions, who have a sneaking suspicion that they know better, try as hard as they possibly can to either gain absolution, or to put it out of their minds with American Idol and Dancing With the Stars.

But we are not children. There is no magic parent who can hold us and coo into our ears, telling us that even though we did wrong, we are still loved. There is no womb. There is no cocoon. There is no exogenous meaning - derived from an outside authority like God or Mom or Dad. There is no immortality. We live for a brief time on this Earth, and then we're gone. Something in our makeup tells us it's wrong to cause others pain, and yet, in our brief lives, we do. On the most massive of scales. We are all culpable. We all, by action or inaction, have given our assent to it. Nothing can erase this stain from us. We are guilty.

Shame on us.

*************

Okay. Depressing shit, to be sure. So what's to be done?

First, we need to acknowledge our sins, and the fact that we're going to keep doing it. People are weak. Though we possess moral instincts, we also possess kill/rape/pillage/steal instincts. It's hard to balance them out with each other some times. We're animals. We have brains and bodies and glands that are the product of millions of years of evolution. Asking us not to hurt each other is like asking a cat not to scratch the couch.

We need to stop looking for the Cosmic Parent to absolve us. We need to come to terms with the fact that our guilt is our guilt, and nothing will make it go away. It's wrong to cause others pain, especially on the supermassive scales of cultures and nations. We can feel it in our bones, so to speak. So we should stop bullshitting around and trying to cook up symbols and schemes which make it okay to do so. "I'm doing it for God." No, fuck you, asshole, you're doing it for you, and appealing to an invisible authority to rationalize it. "I'm doing it for my country." Fuck you, too. A country is a group of individuals who all have the same animal drives, urges for pleasure, urges to avoid pain. They all want to eat, sleep, make babies, and enjoy themselves. NEWSFLASH: So does everyone in every other fucking country! We've all aligned ourselves with a god figure or a flag, broken down into groups with their own arbitrary symbols, and then we squabble over which symbol has more meaning. Fuck that, you imbeciles. Eat, sleep, make babies, and enjoy yourselves; and try not to impede someone else doing the same.

But of course there will be conflicts. It's simple arithmetic - an steadily increasing number of claimants, and steadily dwindling pool of resources. Things are going to get dicey. But when we stop couching our claims in the symbolic language of gods and nations, we can look at them on a rational human basis.

"Lower" animals reach an equilibrium with their peers and their environment. If there are too many lions, some of them starve. It's just the way of things. Symbiotic organism relationships abound in nature. But we have a problem - our big brains. Instead of reaching an equilibrium with our surroundings, we've used our brains to extract more resources to meet our increasing needs, as well as create symbols around which to rally groups of people. And it's worked for a while. But only an idiot would think it is indefinitely sustainable. Resources will still dwindle, and rabid symbol groups will clash with increasingly dangerous types of weapons until most or all of us are dead.

But our brains are both the cause of and solution to all our problems. We can see what we're doing. We can see how foolish it is. We just need to will to shed our pacifiers and security blankets, and to live as the rational human beings we all can be. Aware of our drives, but modulating them in such a way that we can sustain growth as a human civilization. Respectful of an interesting and entertaining past, but able to move beyond it, to not remain hidebound to the superstitions and insanities that governed us in our infancy as an intelligent race.

There are a lot of nitty gritty details to be worked out. It is not going to be easy, and for all I know, there are not enough people of like mind to make the project succeed. We may, perhaps, stay in this infancy, throwing successively larger and larger tantrums, until we kill and/or consume everyone and thing.

But if it does happen, if we do grow, I think the first step is to shed our hope and our desire for a surrogate parent who will absolve and endorse all of our worst actions and attitudes.

We can stand up. We can walk. We can grow. We can become human.

XMAS movie marathon

2006-12-23T19:39:00.000-08:00

Well, I've finished college and I'm unemployed. Which, for whatever sucks about it, does afford me loads of free time. Scads, even. Some of which I've spent filling out grad school applications, some of which I've spent karaoke-ing with friends, some just reading and vegging at home. But it has also afforded me the opportunity to catch up on movies. I'm not going to get into the gory details, but let's just say I have a lot of movies stored up, which I've acquired over the past 2 years or so, but haven't had the time (due to school and work) to watch all of.

So I've fired up my gorgeous (splendiferous, in fact) Sony 50" SXRD widescreen HDTV, turned up the 5.1 channel surround sound, dimmed the lights, made popcorn here and there, and acted like Roger Ebert in the comfort of my own living room. And now I'm going to "BLOG" about it! Aren't you fortunate. Here are my thoughts on the movies I've watched in the past 4 days or so.

X-Men 3: The Last Stand

This is the one not directed by Bryan Singer. I want to say Brett Ratner, but I don't want to look it up to be sure. The story picks up after Jean Grey has died saving her fellows (or something along those lines) in movie number 2.

X3 is certainly a capable action flick. The effects are good, which is to say they're mostly not noticeable. The only "off" effect present is in flashback scenes with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, playing Prof. X and Magneto, respectively. Some sort of CG "smoothing" effect was done on their faces. It looks okay when they're stationary, but something is just not quite right when they speak. Some element of lighting or translucency. Sorry folks, CG just isn't there to this point yet (which means it isn't yet at the point to realistically render human characters sans actors, either).

The movie seems much more concerned with action than with characterization, as opposed to the previous 2 movies. "Angel" is introduced, but is completely undeveloped. None of the characters grow or change. An attempt is made to introduce pathos by "killing" Cyclops, Prof. X, and Jean Grey again. It falls flat. I'd give this movie a 6, though, just for being a good looking flick which holds the interest. The DVD transfer is excellent, as are the other two. Detail is high, edge enhancement and digital "noise" are low, colors are well saturated, and blacks are deep.

Story 5
Acting 6
Directing 5
DVD Transfer 9

Batman Begins

This one I had seen several times before, but I was in a comic book movie mood. It is a "reboot" of the movie franchise, directed by Chris Nolan (Memento) and starring Christian Bale in the title role.

Batman Begins is almost a "tale of two movies." Luckily, both are entertaining - the first movie because of the story, the second because of the excellent cast and decent directing.

The first hour of the film traces Bruce Wayne's evolution from being a young, angry boy witnessing the murders of his parents; to an aimless drifter, trying to find a path to assuage his anger, fear and guilt; to a nascent crime fighter trying to save his city from urban decay on scales both grand and small. Liam Neeson is typecast as the wizened sage who lends him hard-won wisdom - but hey, he's typecast for a reason. He's nailed the role by now. Bale inhabits the character, lending him a gravitas that carries the movie, and would have carried it even if his acting colleagues had not been so equally good.

The second hour follows "Batman" after he has returned to Gotham, made his debut, and is unraveling the plot against the city. Cillian Murphy is quite good as Professor Jonathan Crane, AKA Scarecrow, who gets his start as a corrupt prison psychiatrist. He is in the pay of mobster Carmine Falcone, played ably (if a bit hammily) by Tom Wilkinson. Gary Oldman is Lt. James Gordon, in an INSPIRED bit of casting which both plays him against type and NAILS the Frank Miller version of the character. Michael Caine portrays Alfred Pennyworth, imbuing his performance with such warmth and empathy that he becomes the father figure of the film. Katie Holmes, whose role has been criticized, to my mind does a fine job as Rachel Dawes, an assistant DA and childhood friend of Bruce Wayne who tries her best to fight the rampant corruption of the city. I agree she's a bit young and slight, but she actually acts pretty well in her scenes, particularly when she scolds Wayne for his (ultimately unsuccessful) revenge plot against his parents' killer.

Filmed on location in a CG-enhanced Chicago, a wonderful sense of realism pervades the film. Nolan aimed squarely at grounding the character, as opposed to going "cartoony" as some of the more execrable previous films had - and it succeeds fabulously. "Batman Begins" would function as a regular action thriller without the costumes. It really ramps up the thrills and suspense.

Some things which nagged me: the cartoonish squalor (given the realism of the rest of the film) of the neighborhood surrounding the Opera house outside which the parents are shot; the constant mispronunciation of Ra's Al Ghul (it should be Raish Al Gool, not Roz Al Gool, it comes from the Arabic for "The Demon's Head"); a certain character switcheroo, which I won't reveal; how the heck Batman's grappling hook remains attached the the speeding train in the film's climax.

The DVD transfer is pristine. While the movie is extremely crisp and detailed, not one instance of edge enhancement of video noise caught my eye. For such a dark palette, every black is rendered very deeply with loads of detail.

Overall I give this movie a 9. It really succeeds as an entertainment outside its genre, is splendidly cast, and its failures, if any, are marginal.

Story 8
Acting 9
Directing 8
DVD Transfer 10

Hard Eight

Paul Thomas Anderson's first feature film shows surprising polish. It must have been evident to anyone that this was a director worth watching very early on. When you watch a movie by a "Director" with a capital D, it kind of begs the question - what makes someone a Director as opposed to just some schmuck who yells out "action?"

I've never made a movie. I don't know all the different roles in any encyclopedic way. Does a cinematographer have something to do with the greatness of a shot composition? Or is that the director? Does the casting director have a greater say in some inspired casting choice than a director? I don't know for sure. But I do know that we don't hear much about those role-players when it comes to film. We hear about directors. Sometimes screenwriters. But mostly directors.

So I have to assume that the director is the one who makes the most important creative choices in the movie-making process.

For instance: casting. P.T. Anderson is known for his ensemble casts, and reusing actors frequently. John C. Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman had their big breaks in Anderson's films, each appearing in the first three. Reilly is a particular standout in this film - his dumb, sweet, but slightly dangerous persona really makes watching the film electric and exciting. He is unpredictable, but never in an outlandish way. Philip Baker Hall as Sydney (the original title of the film) could arguably be seen as the central character, but his harsh monotone delivery, though effective, cuts him off from the audience like a noir character cutout. Gwyneth Paltrow is good in her role - the more I see of her, the more I respect her.

Then there's Technique. Anderson is known for his tracking shots - shots which can seem indulgent or cliched if done wrong - but can really work to set mood, place, and theme if done well. A great tracking shot can create "movie magic," the feeling that you're THERE. The feeling that what endangers the characters also threatens you. It quickens your pulse, fans the flames of the emotions intended, it really is the mark, I think, of a great director. Tracking shots, pans, closeups, and compositions are all key elements in creating this magic. Anderson obviously paid attention in film class, because he gets them all done right.

Editing is key. Many a great film has been sabotaged by a director who didn't know when to say no. (See: the Star Wars prequel trilogy) Making a choice as to what just doesn't WORK is the critical one for a film director. Sometimes it's a storytelling choice, sometimes one take of a performance over another, sometimes a setting. But great directors never have us looking at our watches in the theater - nor do they leave us unsatisfied and wanting more explanation. They create characters and situations with these choices that make the movie, whether 90 minutes or 4 hours, a self contained world, with its own sense and rules, which transports us there. Without this critical eye, a movie is just actors pretending that stuff happens.

Hard Eight, a story about a simple guy down on his luck who finds a mentor and a troubled love interest, works. The locations work, the technique works, the music works, the casting works. It's not as inspired as his later stuff (especially Boogie Nights), but it shows the seeds of it, and is enjoyable and transporting in its own right.

The transfer is fine - lots of close-ups and face shots make for an easy job of transferring. Blacks are fine, detail is fine. It's just not a WOW DVD. Not that it really matters a ton. The transfer never gets in the way of being transported by the skill of the craft displayed. Overall, this movie rates an 8.

Story 7
Acting 9
Directing 10
DVD Transfer 7

The Aviator

Speaking of Directors with capital "D's," very few conversations about this happen without the mention of Martin Scorsese. You can love or hate some particular film of his, but I defy anyone to knock his talent. He is a "transporter" par excellence.

First, a word about the performances. I just have to come out and say it - Titanic bedamned, Leonardo DiCaprio is a great actor. Not just good, great. He inhabits his roles in a way generally unlike most successful Hollywood actors. His Howard Hughes is simultaneously charming, complex, offputting, and always fun to watch. Cate Blanchett is one of my favorite actresses ever, and she plays the role of Katherine Hepburn, which could have turned into an awful caricature, quite convincingly and charmingly. Scorsese obviously excels at casting his films, as each and every additional player is so perfect as to blend in completely into the "reality" of the film.

And this is where directing comes in - Scorsese is a transporter of the utmost degree - he channels a Hollywood of the 1920's and 30's which, if it didn't exist in this way historically, does now. Choices in shots never break the illusion of reality. Choices in costume, lighting, music, and color (he saturates certain periods so they look like film from that era) create a magic which truly sucks your mind and body into the place he tries to create. This is a film that any student should watch if they want to learn mastery of movie magic.

All in all, the Hollywood 'biopic' often strays into pat storytelling, and Aviator comes close (i.e. the tortured genius, the unreceptive public, all those old cliches.) But it is told so well that for me the movie was less a story about Howard Hughes than a meditation on a time, a time travel machine, whisking me to a fascinating place that I wanted to just drink in the details. Bravo.

As a DVD, The Aviator is tough to beat - the transfer is clean and beautiful, and gives a vivid canvas to Scorsese's various effects. The audio deserves special mention - it is mixed extremely well, always delivering surround ambiance with music and sound effects (and the roaring crash of an airplane), but keeping the dialogue mixed at a sufficient level never to get lost in the cacophony. Overall, this movie rates a 10, for sheer artistry. Maybe it's a 9 if you're not particularly interested in the period. But to rate it lower would just very likely be dishonesty or churlishness.

Story 8
Acting 9
Directing 10
DVD Transfer 9

Gangs of New York

All of which serves to make Gangs of New York an interesting counterpoint. If Aviator encapsulates everything great about Scorsese as a director, perhaps 'Gangs' pretty much sums up everything else. Now again, I personally don't think much can be faulted in terms of technique. But the story itself, which Scorsese chose to direct, is trite, cliche, and hackneyed. DiCaprio again stars, this time as Amsterdam Vallon, the son of an Irish immigrant who seeks revenge for his father's slaying in a gang war. He goes up against Bill 'the Butcher' Cutting, played by Daniel Day Lewis with a hamminess rarely seen in serious cinema. Cameron Diaz is the improbably beautiful and also improbably not-a-hooker Jenny Everdeane, the neighborhood beauty with mysterious ties to both men. A typically strong supporting cast includes John C. Reilly as flunky turned corrupt cop Happy Jack, Jim Broadbent as Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall, Liam Neeson as, you guessed it, the grizzled father figure, the slain Priest Vallon, among many other fine performances.

Why doesn't it work? Well, for one thing, where Aviator's three hours whizzed by, Gangs' three hours seem a chore about a third of the way in. I think it's the basic triteness of the story. Character motivations are paper-thin, and the sense of time and place is never really crystallized. It's hard to judge whether this is a writing problem or a directing one - but Scorsese certainly never saves the script by inserting a scene which could have broadened the context. I knew, in an academic sense, that perhaps neighborhoods in 19th century New York might have attained this level of squalor, but it never felt real. Perhaps some establishing shots of the rest of the city might have improved this sense of place, I don't know. But it all felt disconnected to me as a viewer.

The characters don't add much, either. When the accents don't get in the way of comprehension, a general inability to identify with them gets in the way of enjoyment. How do these characters get food? What do they fill their days with? If Amsterdam Vallon's life upon returning to his neighborhood is any indication, either he did absolutely nothing for 18 hours a day, or the movie only takes place over about 4 days total. There's just a whole lot of nothing in between fight scenes and bawdy barroom set pieces.

Well, whatever. Technical merits: The DVD looks good, but not great. With so many bright outdoor scenes, the level of graininess just doesn't strike my eye as acceptable. Interior scenes are lush, however. The soundtrack is interesting, especially during the opening scene, with a martial drum pacing the buildup to the first gang battle. Overall I give this movie a 6. The film maker is obviously talented, but this is an abortive effort which never clicks.

Story 5
Acting 8
Directing 7
DVD Transfer 8

Happiness

Todd Solondz opens up a whole can of worms when discussing directors - what of the director whose technical talents (or budgets) are not the primary appeal of his or her work, but rather their story and editing choices, directing of actors, and the like?

Happiness is gripping from beginning to end, mainly because of its complete moral ambiguity and unwillingness to hold the viewer's hand in making value judgments of its characters. Any movie whose protagonists include an unrepentant child molester who drugs his targets; a lonely, overweight man who masturbates incessantly and stalks his high-rise neighbor; the overweight woman who reaches out to him and reveals a dark secret of murder; a female naif in search of a man, who unwittingly drives one suitor to suicide and finds another who is a Russian con man; among so many others, is obviously not a film cut from the same moral cloth as your average Hollywood drivel.

Solondz finds what is human about each character and shows it on the screen without repentance or the kind of distance most storytellers choose to "play it safe." In this, his work achieves a sort of novelistic quality - just like an omniscient narrative which places you inside the heads of sometimes unsavory characters.

A wealth of technical merits is not what you need to watch Happiness for. The DVD transfer is abysmal - a non-anamorphic letterboxed 4:3 image with loads of noise, crap black levels, and mediocre sound. It's not as though the imagery would lend itself to a splendiferous transfer anyway - color palette is muted, most shots are static medium shots of dialogue.

But this is not a movie to miss if you like to be challenged and provoked by what you watch. This movie is not for the faint of heart - not because of its outrageous violence or gore - but because of its unflinching nature and unwillingness to settle for pat, trite stories and characters with whom no one could find easy fault.

Story 9
Acting 9
Directing 9
DVD Transfer 4

V for Vendetta

Here is a movie which falls in the "could have challenged politically correct mores more than it did, but nice try" category. Adapted from a middling Alan Moore graphic novel by the Wachowski brothers (of Matrix fame/infamy), it prospers and suffers in the same ways their previous trilogy did. It is ambitious and slickly produced, with neat action scenes, an impression of depth, but not as much meat as something like Happiness (apples and oranges perhaps, but valid I think nonetheless - I'm talking about moral meat). I certainly applaud their willingness to portray the story as one of justifiable terrorism against an oppressive government. I just think they could have done better both with choosing their source material or in fleshing it out in new and interesting ways. Frankly, the comic book-style conceits of a government-engineered super soldier just detract from the potential power of the piece to challenge and perplex.

Casting is pretty good, as Stephen Fry adds nice, sad notes as a homosexual government-run TV producer in danger of being outed to the arch-conservative government bureaucracy; Portman does a passable British impression (but again seems leashed by comic-book-y writing tropes and does not shine as brightly as in something like Closer); Weaving's voice-acting as V is suitably creepy (though one cannot help but feel he is wasted behind a mask and cloak the whole film); and John Hurt is quite nice as the evil, sneering, hypocrite of a dictator in this fascist England fantasy.

Overall, I found the political elements of the film interesting and provocative, but felt it was undercut by the material itself and by the Matrix-style sound effects and fight scenes. Guys, martial arts swords just do not sound like that and fly like they do in the Matrix. When the Matrix is presented as an alternate reality, it can be suspended in disbelief. But V for Vendetta cries out to be more serious, and just doesn't fly.

The transfer is nice. Sound effects are crisp (regardless of their hampering of story), black levels are good (important in so dark a film), and colors are rich.

Story 7
Acting 8
Directing 8
DVD Transfer 9

((More to come.))

Storytelling
Corpse Bride
Little Miss Sunshine
Adaptation
Human Nature
Stranger Than Fiction
The Departed
The Prestige

Article: The Worst Congress Ever

2006-10-29T21:44:00.000-08:00

This is the most imporant article any American could possibly read before the upcoming election. Don't delay. I don't care if you're at work, paying your bills, doing homework, surfing some hot porn - drop whatever it is right this second and read.

Words to ponder

2006-10-29T09:21:00.000-08:00

For fun, try switching the names around. Which ones might be said by Karl Rove, Don Rumsfeld, or George W. MonkeyFace?

“The broad mass of the nation ... will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” — Adolf Hitler, in his 1925 book Mein Kampf.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” — Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.

“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” — Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Göring during the Nuremberg Trials.

"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier... just so long as I'm the dictator." -Online NewsHour interview, Washington, DC, (December 18, 2000

Reality Show Idea: America's Next Top Philosopher

2006-09-28T07:31:00.000-07:00

I have a problem. I come up with million dollar ideas every day. Or at least a few times a week. I just don't have the capital to put them into action. For instance: Extra large tubes of Chapstick. Most of the cost of that junk is in the plastic tube. If you just made one a little bigger and charged twice the money for it, you'd surely make a profit because the cost of the retail SKU would go up more than the cost of the production. People love that shit. They're addicted. They'd snap up an "Economy Size" tube like Oprah would a baked ham.

So here's last night's million dollar idea: I was watching America's Next Top Model, and the thought seized me. They should do a reality show about grad students. When you really think about it, it's shocking that it hasn't been done. Here you have a population of twenty and thirty-somethings, who are either painfully socially maladroit or vain, egotistical assholes. They're poor as a rule, although there would be some privileged silver spoon types. There is usually intense competition for spots and for funding in any given grad school, making for adrenaline-packed conflicts. They're also usually emotionally disturbed drunkards, which lends itself to much "Girls Gone Wild" style hijinks as well as melancholy musical montages.

So what would the most entertaining grad school reality show be? In my opinion, America's Next Top Philosopher (Alternately... Project Philosophy, or Philosphers:The Biggest Losers).

See, Philosophy is one of those subjects that draws in people who are searching, yearning sorts. Academic drifters who are unsatisfied by other fields until the find the calling towards wisdom. Or inveterate BS artists who want to avoid real work by picking a field with no "easy answers." So you'd have a ripe population of people who would love to receive the prize of the show.

What prize? A $100,000 fellowship, a tenure track position at University X, and a book publishing contract.

You get 12 philosophy grads, board them all together in some frat house on some university campus, and have a 13 week show eliminating them through philosophy challenges, with a judging panel opf three eminent but also entertaining Philosophy personalities.

The challenges can be regarding the 12 great philosophical questions: beauty, causality, death, free will, God, justice, meaning of life, moral duty, the self, time, truth, and ultimate reality. The contestants are given their question to answer, and through the course of the episode, they research, screw around, debate, etc. until they formulate a response. At the end of the episode, they deliver a "defense" of their thesis to the panel of judges (probably a 30 minute defense, liberally edited down for TV viewing.)

You could also have a makeover episode, in which each student is decked out in the best academic finery and given a haircut/"What not to Wear" style advice session on presenting oneself for job interviews or going on dates.

Here's why I think it would work: I know for a fact that the reality show "Project Runway" has a huge following among intellectuals. How do I know this? Well, I work at the University of Chicago at the moment. To date, every single person I have talked to about the show either currently watches it or wishes they had cable so they could watch it. A show with the addictive elements of Reality TV (i.e. personality conflicts, young, attractive cast members) combined with some intellectual or at least pseudo-intellectual elements would probably be a big hit. It would be controversial of course, because the muckety-mucks of the higher education community would all pooh-pooh it, while others would praise its spreading of academic ideas to a more popular audience. What channel? Maybe Bravo, AMC, TLC or some other channel that has an audience that would be receptive. Fox or NBC might not be the best fits.

OK, execs, start emailing me! If you steal my idea, I'll sue. It's all here on my blog, copyright: me!

The real truth of the baseball/sex metaphor

2006-09-15T09:16:00.000-07:00

This article on wikipedia is fucking hilarious. I knew that site was good for something.

This just in: Xbox 360 is cool.

2006-09-14T09:58:00.000-07:00

Okay, by "cool," I don't mean "iPod" cool. Not cool in the "cool kids at school" sense of the word. But cool to a gaming nerd like me who was kind of skeptical of Microsoft in the whole video game console enterprise.

Some background: I had an Xbox, modded with a 120 GB hard drive. It was pretty sweet. I lost it in the fire that trashed my former apartment. I always liked it, but it didn't hold the same place in my heart as the Dreamcast or my Gamecube. The Cube was the first system I repurchased (my games survived the carnage with a little cleaning).

Xbox always seemed to be sort of the hottest car in DuBuque, Iowa. A great ride, but nowhere to go. It was certainly the most powerful of the last-gen consoles. When you found compelling software to run on it (like DOA3 or Ninja Gaiden), it could blow the doors off its competition in terms of graphics. However, it was always kind of lacking in terms of variety and original titles. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was cool, but kind of just a watered-down PC game, really. I never liked Halo, as I think FPS games for the most part are a silly exercise in controller-wrestling on a console. There has not been one console FPS which has bested the mouse-keyboard combo. Everything else worthwhile on the Box was just a port. Grand Theft Auto never looked or played better, but it could be had on PS2. Same for games like SSX, Midnight Club, Burnout, etc.

But, as I've rebuilt my life and finances after losing a lot, I had some free dough to drop, and wanted to finish GTA:San Andreas and KOTOR2. So I got the 360, since it emulates original Xbox games in software. I bought the Premium console used on EBay, with the hard drive and wireless controller. To round it out, I got Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion and DOA4 to test out the new hardware, too.

And you know what? I love the darn thing.

First off, I think the most important 'cool' aspect of the 360 is HD gaming. Pure and simple - once you play in widescreen 720p, it's hard to see much of a point in playing any way else. Of course, I still love my Cube games like Pikmin and Metroid Prime, but I always played them in stretch mode on my widescreen LCD anyway. Having games run in 720p natively is the way it ought to be. Text is clear and crisp, resolution and alaising are things of the past, it just kicks ass.

The wireless controllers are neat, too. The 360's standard wireless pad feels great (an improvement on the Xbox's "S" controller, which was pretty great to begin with), and works well wirelessly. It recharges its NiMH battery via USB - I've never played long enough to test the battery life. What this really does is free you up in terms of console placement and seating. I have my console above my LCD monitor - which would be impossible with a cord dangling down.

Xbox Live is integrated right into the dashboard of the console, and really feels like an integrated, well thought out part of the experience, not just a pointless add-on. The OS on the 360 is elegant. I never thought I'd say such a thing about a Microsoft OS. It's clearly laid out, simple, but gives you a lot of options. Game demos are downloadable for free, and add-on packs can be purchased with credit card. Arcade games can also be downloaded for about $5. When it comes down to it, it really is another level of content and service, which hasn't really existed in consoles before - even if you never play against someone else online, which I haven't yet.

So far, the horsepower of the console impresses, as well. Apparently, it has a three-CPU core, with three processors running at 3.2 Ghz apiece, along with an ATI graphics chip, and 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM shared between the two. If you aren't hip to the techno babble, this makes the Xbox360 nearly as powerful as a high-end gaming PC which would run you $2000 or more. To me, this is an extremely attractive aspect of the console - you essentially get a kick-ass gaming machine for $400, which you don't have to upgrade at all and can run all the current games in their full visual glory with no compatibility issues. Previous consoles were always 2 or 3 years behind the cutting edge of PC gaming - 2000's PS2 had a 294 Mhz processor and 32 MB of system RAM, for instance - specs that were already sorely dated in the PC world by1998.

This horsepower is evident in the games, as well. ES4:Oblivion is a deep, complex, "Lord of the Rings"-style RPG with graphics that rival the best PC games on the market today and gameplay complexity to match. DOA4, on the other hand, is a refinement of the console fighting game with the best graphics yet seen, matched with typically fluid control. That said, though, it's not as though there has been anything utterly mind-blowing graphically. It's just that consoles have finally caught up with PCs, and can run it on an HD set.

All in all, I'm stoked about the system's potential. While the original Xbox didn't have a ton of exclusive titles, it did have every cross-platform title out there, and usually the best version graphically. If the 360 even achieves this, it will be gaming bliss. I get the feeling, though, given the PS3's delays and pricing woes ($600!), and the Wii's essential uniqueness, that the 360 is positioned to have the best slate of games for the foreseeable future.

A prediction

2006-08-29T09:58:00.000-07:00

I predict that some time in October, likely quite late in the month, the valient men and women of the Homeland Security Department will foil a "terror plot." Likely throught the use of the much-debated procedures advocated by the Bush administration, such as unwarranted wiretaps. The foiling of this plot will be celebrated in the press and much public crowing will occur claiming credit.

All nicely before the mid-term election in the first week of November.

Will the plot actually have occurred? Will it be faked? Will the alleged perpetrators actually exist?

We shall see.

But if you say you would put it past this administration to cook up something like it, I would say you're either insufferably ignorant or a goddamned liar.

Emulation and ethics

2006-08-17T07:28:00.000-07:00

At various points in the past few years, I have gotten on a retro kick with regard to videogames. The deep seated psychological reasons for this can wait for another post. But suffice it to say, I've developed a recurring yen to play the games I grew up with.

Here are the consoles I've owned in my lifetime: Atari 2600, NES, Dreamcast, PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox. As you can see, there is a distinct gap in consoles - I never had a Genesis, SNES, N64, or PS1. I played those consoles with friends, more sparingly than the ones I personally owned. For the most part, I'm concerned with playing games on the consoles of my youth, so everything from Atari 2600 to SNES. I still own the newer consoles (though some were destroyed in a recent fire), and can play them regularly.

So herein lies the dilemma - some of these consoles, the NES for instance, are notoriously prone to breakdown. Shoot, the connectors on my original NES were wearing down a tad when I still played the thing with regularity. The "NES blowjob" is something an entire generation of Americans saddled with that crappy hardware are quite familiar with (Japanese and European games got a top-loading NES, which didn't experience the same issues that plagued the American "toaster" version) . Now, the Atari itself and its games are durable beyond most reasonable standards. But their controllers, especially the paddle variety, are known for their failures. The other dilemma is presented by arcade games - geographically it can be extremely difficult to find this or that machine that you used to log precious hours and quarters on in your formative years. These machines still working at an acceptable level is also difficult to find with regularity.

But a-ha - we are not doomed to either abandoning this quest for our youth or to spending inordinate sums of money on a collectible market - enterprising computer dweebs have programmed wonderful little programs for PC and Mac called emulators. These programs simulate the operation of the original machine within a windows or mac environment. But the catch is, they need ROMs to run - direct 'images' of the cartridge or arcade circuitboard which the emulator interprets just as the original machine did way back when. And just like the 'sharing' or copying of music and movies, video game ROMs are frowned upon by the big guns in the industry such as Nintendo, and exist in the same sort of hazy nether-world of uncertainty that mp3s also inhabit.

As clearcut as Nintendo's FAQ would like to present the issue, the "legality" of ROM images has not been clearly defined. It is still being debated sporadically in courts.

Now, I am not a lawyer. Nor do I ever wish to become one. I am a philosophy student. So I'd rather attack the issue ethically as opposed to strictly legally.

Ownership

The way I see it, I owned the various consoles listed above, as well as X number of games for them. Those consoles have fallen into a state of disrepair through normal use, or "act of God" in terms of a fire (though it was really the act of a drunken, irresponsible illegal alien who was squatting in the basement, but that's another story...). So I don't see any ethical issue whatsoever with my downloading an emulator for that system and the ROMs of any games I have owned at any given time to play them. I bought them (or my parents did), back in the day. Why should I not be able to play them because the hardware was designed so poorly?

So that covers games I have owned and played in the past. But it certainly doesn't cover arcade games, and games on consoles I never owned. So is it OK for me to download and play those games?

Abandonment

"Abandonware" is a pretty hotly debated concept, and no conclusions have yet been drawn. Nintendo makes its stance clear, but frankly I disagree with it. Copyright law is designed to protect a publisher or creator's right to profit or not profit from their creation's use. But if profit or lack of profit isn't part of the equation, does such a protection still hold?

If I find a book laying in a garbage dump, do I have the right to read it if I didn't purchase it? It's been abandoned. Why should I not read it? Presumably, it got there because someone paid for it, then discarded it. Even if they did not, is it really my burden to track down the history of this particular copy of a muddy old book to ensure that I don't inadvertently gyp Steven King out of 42 cents in royalties?

If a company has no plans to profit from an old work, I really don't see the harm in my freely downloading it and enjoying it. I'm not paying anyone for it, nor do I intend to sell it to anyone else. The company in question is not even involved in any commercial venture concerning the work in question. Legal or not, I have no ethical issue whatsoever with enjoying an abandoned piece of work.

But, alas, this only covers a portion of what I might wish to play. Nintendo in particular, but to a lesser extent Namco, Capcom, Activision, and other software companies make it a regular habit to dig up their old software, repackage it (usually as a "greatest hits" collection), and sell it back to the consumer, usually at a price not befitting its general level of obselescence. Nintendo has plans to sell its old games via a "Virtual Console" service on its new Wii console, debuting this year. So Nintendo definitely has active plans to profit from its old work, as is its right.

So if I want to play Super Mario 3, or Sonic the Hedgehog, games I never owned, it looks like I am ethically out of luck. Or am I?

The Karma Fund

All right folks, this is my creation. No one I know of has ever discussed it, at least by this name. But it's the slender (and very debatable) plank upon which I rest my general moral comfort with emulating and playing games I never owned and which still might be commercially exploitable by their original publisher.

Thesis: Nintendo (for example) profited immensely by selling its hardware and software to millions of consumers (including me). Some of the hardware was prone to problems and premature failure, leading to the additional expenditure of money and its eventual abandonment. Therefore, bad Karma for nintendo, 'Karmic dollars' in the Karma Fund to me as a victim of Nintendo's practice of producing shoddy merchandise.

Thesis: Game publishers in the era ~1975-1995 produced an addictive product of widely variable quality, restricted access to information about this product, and sold it at an unreasonably inflated price. The connection between video games and addictive behavior has long been studied, even back in the 80's by surgeon general C. Everett Koop. They found that the processes of the brain while playing games exhibit the same endorphin release and reuptake cycle as addictive drugs. Game advertising back in those days was not subject to any restrictions - whereas today, advertisments are required to indicate whether a screenshot represents actual gameplay, back then they did not. So you'd often get really stoked by an ad that this game would be the next best thing to sliced bread, when in fact is turned out to be a buggy, ugly piece of crap. And as far as price goes, "Game Paks" which were sold for $50, for example, would currently retail for $97.93, when the price is adjusted for inflation! (it is even worse for games from the Atari age of the late 70s, where games retailed for the equivalent of $120-$160!) Considering the costs of development for a game whose data spans an enormous 16kb, those prices are difficult to justifyby any means, especially when the product itself is addictive. Therefore: 'Karmic dollars' put into the fund by publishers' practices in the day, justifiably withdrawn by me as the victim of crappy games, addiction, and exorbitant pricing.

So - if endeed I am entitled by my reparations from the Karma Fund, I don't find it particularly egregious to download better games than the ones I had purchased back in the day, at a price ($0.00) which compensates me for the gouging I was subject to in the 1980's and 1990's.

That said, I have no issue with the current game pricing scheme. $50 in today's dollars pretty accurately corresponds to the development costs of a big-name current-gen game, with its gigabytes of data, textures, music, voice acting, etc. Only when a game is of substandard quality is a discount justified, or in cases when the market has dictated that people just won't pay that price any longer - as in the happy case of Sony's "Greatest Hits" series of $14.99 to $20.00 games.

Games as Art

Another argument for the preservation of games by any means, including emulation, is that they represent a new form of artistic expression, and thus should be preserved for future generations to enjoy and study. How much better off would Academia be if we had complete libraries of the works of the Pre-Socratics? If the science of the ancients had survived the Dark Ages, and allowed us to build upon their advances earlier? If every painting and work of literature had been preserved?

Surely, there is plenty of crap in each of these fields. Any art form or medium is subject to the same bell curve of quality as everything else. And certainly, I am not arguing (yet) that there is a video game of equivalent importance to human thought and letters as Plato's Republic or Shakespeare's plays.

But video games represent a medium which has a singular power to involve the player in critical thinking and moral choice, and immerse them in worlds with unquestionable artistic merit. Certainly, before video games disappear as a medium (something that shows no evidence of occurring any time soon) a video game artist will create something that challenges its audience to think in new and important ways, to reassess some issue of life as human beings. It may have already happened, it's difficult to say without any distance. Shouldn't the nascent stages of the growth of this medium be preserved?

As history has indicated, the authors and creators of this or that work cannot be trusted to preserve their creations for posterity. Should we discourage a community of people who do just that, without an interest in profit? Personally, I think not.

As far as my playing such preserved relics of videogaming past - am I justified? Well, put it this way - Am I justified if I read Plato's Complete Works without buying a copy from Hackett Publishing? Are libraries justified, since millions can read books or view movies without paying for them?

At some point, a work's value as art supercedes any legal or financial strictures on its use. Once a creator of such a work has profited from it to a reasonable degree (i.e. beyond needs for their subsistence and general financial rewards for public acclaim for their work), it should be allowed to be preserved, enjoyed, and studied by future generations.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Legality aside, I believe there is a moral case for emulating and playing downloaded games from the 1980's and 90's for free, as long as you seek no monetary gain from the activity. It may well be that as a matter of convenience and ease of use, that you (or indeed I) may eventually opt for one or more of the legal avenues of emulation (like Nintendo's Wii console, or games like Namco Museum). But if you don't have the resources or just aren't inclined to pay for games you've already owned, personally, I think you have avenues of justification. On the other hand, I don't think there is ever a justification for profiting from the sale of emulators or ROM images. Not only have millions already been gouged for their games, but it just plays into the hands of legal arguments against this vital and fun means of preserving gaming history.

Stay tuned for a series of posts regarding my emulation experiences and recommendations for download!

But what is truth, if you follow me?

2006-08-10T06:29:00.000-07:00

The latest from the Bush administration: Retroactive war crime protection proposed.

See, apparently Bush administration policy makers are worried that their "detainee" torture memos will result in their being tried by an International War Crimes Tribunal for violating the Geneva Convention. Apparently unsure whether their contention that the "War on Terror" is not actually a war, and that prisoners are not "prisoners of war" will stick, the idea wizards in Bush's primate house have decided on a new strategy - enact US legislation which supercedes the Geneva Accord which the United Stated signed in good faith way back in 1929, when language made sense, politicians were concerned about "statesmanship," and presidents could form complete sentences with subjects and predicates.

Have I mentioned that I wish George Bush were dead? Is that illegal? Well, no worry - if it is, I'll just write to my congressman and ask that he introduce legislation that says that it isn't - even after the fact! Shit, why don't we just retroactively declare murder legal, and empty our prisons? That would be a good way to trim our $8.4 Trillion national debt, and record budget shortfalls introduced by our so-called "conservative" president.

In fact, I propose that we abandon all standards of meaning. Language is so limiting. So instead of this headline:

Retroactive war crime protection proposed.

why don't we loosen those restrictive and repressive grammar and vocabulary rules and allow ourselves to write like this:

Oldie bad-bad make no-no.

But frankly, that's still too limiting. It has a tenuous connection to the meaning fo the first headline. It's linguistic fascism to demand such a literal means of communication. How about:

Fuzzy wigwam bleat pencil mukluk.

There, that's better. Now unsuspecting good patriotic Americans won't be opressed by the suggestion that their leaders are criminal fuck-tards who will do anything to cover their fat, pasty behinds.

Where are all the asteroids Hollywood said were heading towards Earth?

Bush's war on language, thinking, terror...

2006-07-11T07:38:00.000-07:00

Here is a story about the Supreme Court invalidating the Bush administration's policy of not extending Geneva Convention rights to "detainees."

You will note, gentle reader, this passage:

The policy, described in a memo by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, appears to reverse the administration's earlier insistence that the detainees are not prisoners of war and thus subject to the Geneva protections.

The sheer audacity of this administration astounds me. I thought this was a "War" on Terror? I thought all of the bushelfulls of dollars we were throwing at the Department of Defense and "independent" contractors such as Halliburton were for a "War"effort?

But the people we were fighting were not involved in a "War"?

The only war here is being waged against the American people by a fucking lunatic and his power-mad, money-hungry cronies. And let me clue you in... the true combatants don't wear turbans. They wear power suits and little American Flag pins on their lapels.

Please see below for the asteroidal fate I hope they all meet.

Movie Review: Superman Returns

2006-07-03T09:58:00.000-07:00

Okay. Writing about this movie is tough - one reason being that there are probably 200 reviews online, so coming up with something new to say is a challenge. But also, I was skeptical of this movie from the get go - when I saw the first screenshots, I kinda went "aww, gee, Spider-man 3 with a different costume. Yawn." Did we really need another "update" of a superhero story with whiz bang effects and ho-hum writing? The Spider-Man flicks are enjoyable, don't get me wrong, but they're about as intellectually nourishing as a pop tart. When I saw Superman's "new" costume, with its plastic dimpled "S" and dark-toned cape, I thought it was going to be another "update" movie, which sacrifices the essence of a character with almost 70 years of history to appease a modern audience who might think a guy running around in tights is silly.

Am I ever glad I was wrong!

I should have trusted Bryan Singer. The dude's proved he can do a good superhero flick, one that not only tickles the senses but also hangs together with dramatic coherence. True, they each kind of collapsed under the weight of the "summer movie conclusion," as basically every superhero flick ever done has, but until those points they were generally thoughtful takes on their characters, filled with ass-kicking action, good performances, good looks, and brisk, entertaining stories.

What Works

The central conceit of the movie, that Superman has been gone and the world has changed since, works brilliantly. In some ways, it couldn't be truer. Most people just don't read the comics, and any TV show gets spotty viewership at best. So in a very real sense, Superman has been gone for 10 or 20 years from most people's lives. And boy, has the world changed since then. In the 70's of the Reeve films, Americans were disillusioned by government corruption and scared of nuclear annihilation. Now, we still suffer from those issues, but have added to that noxious mix terrorism, crushing political and social apathy, a nearly complete degradation of social mores and morals, a jaded indifference to same, blind jingoism and intolerance, well-deserved global hatred of the United States, and reality television. Not only has Superman been gone, but so has everything he represented. In short, things suck.

Speaking of jaded, I don't think I'm the only one who's become jaded by movies. Summer action "blockbusters" have lately been anything but. We've seen it all. What effects romp can possibly dazzle us now? Action sequences have been uniformly boring since at least Star Wars Episode 1. I can't remember the last time a film thrilled me, scared me, or moved me. Laughter, sure. Irony, too. Sadness, rarely. But thrills? No way. Even "Batman Begins", as good as it was, still kind of left me cold. I just admired it as a great take on the character. But it lacked that magic, that ineffable element to great moviemaking that transports you into a situation, makes you feel all the twists and turns, puts you at the edge of your seat.

Superman Returns has that magic. If not for the whole 2 1/2 hour run time (which would be a super feat in itself), for such a significant percentage that it is uniformly thrilling.

So the question for a critic becomes, why? Is it the technical proficiency of the effects? While the CGI and set design are extremely accomplished, that certainly isn't it. Superman 1 had the magic, and you could tell when rear projection and mattes were being used. My opinion is this - as with all great movies, the magic of "transportation" is only accomplished when all the elements gel together - the true talent of a great director. 20% might be technical proficiency, sure. But the other 80% are some combination of storytelling choices, writing, and performances.

Here is why the "return" conceit of the movie works to such great effect. Superman, and with him that feeling of "gee whiz, America, baseball, mom, apple pie, and doing good deeds are great," has been gone. So much crap has happened in those five (or twenty) years, it's hard to remember a time when those feelings even existed. But when Superman swoops in and saves a jumbo jet full of people from plummeting to Earth in a fireball, this story choice not only keenly parallels some of the awful events we've lived through recently, but also tells us: This is how things could have been. If there had been a Superman, maybe some of that stuff wouldn't have happened. Not only that, but maybe if some of his ideals and his character were more prevalent, things might be better. It's fantasy and wish fulfillment of the highest order, and it provides an emotional punch to the gut that injects what would otherwise be stale effects set pieces with gravitas. I want Superman to exist when I watch him save a plane or deflect a falling chunk of a building. I want someone to care that much and be that ethically pure. I want a respite from the daily chum-bucket of modern American life. It is this yearning, that tickling of a desire within us that we might have thought was dead, which makes us pull for and feel what is happening on the screen. For whatever its other faults might be, Singer nails this emotional core of the story, and it's why Superman Returns works as a whole.

Brandon Routh's performance also works, and is obviously a very important part of the film's success. He plays the Clark Kent role extremely well, both aping Reeve's performance as well as deepening it just a tad. In fact, the Kent stuff worked so well, I wished there had been much more of it. Which is not to say that the Superman scenes did not work - except for one or two miscues which were more the fault of the writers, Routh's Superman is super, vulnerable, likeable, and amazing all at once. At times he seems a bit slight for the role, he's tall and muscular, but kind of thin and young - but he plays it with seriousness and just the slightest smirk, and it is successful and charming.

Kate Bosworth's performance has been attacked by some critics, but I for one liked it. Lois Lane is really the focus of the movie - her love affair with Superman is a dramatic mirror for all of our own love affairs with the character. Indeed, as she tells her fiancee in the film: Everyone was in love with him. So it becomes her role to crystallize why we had fallen in love with him, why we were upset that he was gone, and why it's so great to have him back. I think Bosworth gives her portrayal enough complexity to accomplish the task. She is also likeable when she needs to be, and sad/bitter, too. Not to mention she looks great. So I guess for me, she was "enough." I liked her, I could see why Supes had a thing for her, and I understood her character's emotional turmoil. Maybe she didn't have the spark of Margot Kidder, but she convincingly portrayed the drama, and is a lot hotter, to boot.

James Marsden completes the love triangle in this film, and does so quite ably. His role as Lois' fiancee strikes the perfect tone to make this a complex and engaging character story in addition to a rousing action flick. Too many "romances" in movies fall back on tired cliches to manipulate the audience - so often the "competition" for the girl is a posterboard villainous jerk, to contrast with the sterling protagonist, as if to put in huge neon letters for the audience: ROOT FOR THIS GUY. It is insulting to our collective intelligence, degrading for the female characters, and sadder than anything that many people actually need and like this lack of complexity in their movies.

In this love triangle, Marsden plays the genuinely nice guy, a devoted fiancee and dad, whose steadfastness, bravery and availability were what Lois needed, despite whatever torches she may have still been carrying. Superman is in fact the "jerk" in the situation. He got sexually involved with someone and then took off for parts unknown for five years, leaving her in the lurch. Now, upon his return, he hopes to insinuate himself back into her life - following her around with x-ray vision and super hearing. But her better judgment is telling her to have none of it. It's not fair to her or her fiancee and child, and he knows it. He's not a big enough jerk to really push it, but his desire for her still compels him. This complex triangle enlivens the characters in the movie and makes us as an audience really want to know what happens next.

Casting throughout is terrific. Kevin Spacey is very good as Lex Luthor - equally as funny as Gene Hackman's previous turn in the role, he also has that disturbing edge of psychosis which really makes it fun and creepy to watch. Parker Posey, perhaps the funniest actress of her generation, does well in her limited role as Lex's primary accomplice/squeeze. Frank Langella plays Perry White with cynicism but charm and warmth. Sam Huntington is Jimmy Olsen to a tee.

Singer does a great job acknowledging the first two Chris Reeve films, cherry-picking the cool stuff while systematically ignoring the dorky bits. Still present are the ice-planet Krypton, eerie superpowered crystals, star-shaped meteor ships, and Brando as Jor-El. The Smallville farm is nearly identical, and Eva Marie Saint does a fine job as Ma Kent. Gone are the super-memory-erase-kiss, cellophane "S" symbols, teleportation, illusion, flying really really fast to go back in time, and the like. "Superman Returns" is not a sequel, but neither is it a "reboot" like "Batman Begins." It's just a new version of the story which shows its creators' super-sized love affair with previous Donner-Reeve collaborations.

You see, this is actually consistent with the great tradition of comic books - when a character's been around for 60 years, a lot of silly stuff gets written. If modern Superman comics had Krypto the Superdog, Jimmy Olsen as Elastic Lad, and forty colors of kryptonite, modern readers might balk. The key is to distill the essence of the past while telling a story suited to the sensibilities of modern audiences. As a creator, you can be in love with a previous version and do an homage. Or you can slash and burn everything that went before and try to make your take original and fresh. But like a comic book, you should be able to pick up a random issue and pretty much know all the basics, with the details not really being essential to enjoying the self-contained yarn within.

For instance, one friend of mine balked at Kate Bosworth being "too young." He's really missing the point. No, Lois wasn't 11 when "Superman 1" took place - you're just being too stinking literal. The point is, she's plucky Lois Lane, Superman ditched her 5 years ago, and she's steamed as all heck when he comes back. Bosworth nails these essentials without ever having to replicate an old performance or shoehorn herself into a previous continuity. It would be like asking a modern day Jim Lee to replicate Curt Swan's classic 1960's and 70's art when he draws a Superman comic. Why would you desire such a thing? If you want Curt Swan, dig up some old back issues and get the real thing. If you want "classic" Reeve and Kidder, very good DVDs of the first two flicks are easily purchased. For that matter, so are versions of the 50's George Reeves Supes, the 90's "Lois and Clark," and the current "Smallville" series. They're each perfectly valid takes on a set of characters, and they each play loose with one aspect of continuity or another. It doesn't matter, though, as long as the essentials are there.

This movie was obviously a huge labor of love for Singer. There seems little doubt that he was influenced mightily by Donner's original films, and that they have a great emotional resonance for him (as indeed they do for most of us within a certain age cohort). The original John Williams score is used to booming effect from the outset - thought it is remixed in some interesting and bittersweet ways throughout the film, too. Little winking touches which acknowledge the previous films permeate the script.

Singer is a visual director par excellence. Nearly any superhero movie will live or die by its look - it is essential to translate the kinetic energy of its parent medium. Superman Returns looks like the best comic book ever drawn - poses are iconic, set dressings are ornate and stylish, colors are lush and evocative.

What Doesn't Work

So much of this film worked, that singling out dud elements seems like picking nits. There are, however, a few pretty large nits that deserve picking.

As previously mentioned, with Superman Returns, Singer again falls prey to the "overwrought supervillian plot conclusion" bug that stifled the otherwise great "Batman Begins," both X-Men flicks, and both Spider-Mans. It's too bad that it happens, but given the overall record of comic book films, it's generally forgivable. The character dynamic of the first 90 minutes had been so rich and interesting, that it was a shame to sort of cut away to a big action plot. This must also be why, when the movie winds down with a 20 minute denouement, it feels like you're going back to stuff which could have been tied up before.

Lex Luthor's crystal plot is insufferably hokey. Ummm, okay Lex - naturally, if you were to kill hundreds of millions of people (not to mention American people, the most violent, retribution-seeking people around) by creating a new continent, surely no one's feathers would be ruffled, and you'd have loads of investors waiting to buy your land. Also - the crystal which Superman used to build his fortress of solitude was green, not clear. Was it programmed with the Fortresses' dimensions? Why would the clear crystals sprout uncontrollably into continents? Did Lex alter them somehow? What happened to the other unused ones at the end of the movie? It looks very much like they fell onto the ground, and possibly into the water. If they get wet, will they too accidentally sprout? Lots and lots of holes here, none terribly important, since the story is really about the characters - but still enough to make heads itch and to pull you away from the fantasy just a bit. On the other hand, Lex's scheme, implausible as it may be, provides a nice sense of impending doom, which matches well with natural disasters of recent vintage such as tsunamis and floods.

Lois Lane provided an additional issue of credulity - the physical beating she takes in this movie just strains belief - she gets tossed around an airplane cabin at multiple gee forces, yet emerges with nary a scratch or bump. Then, later into he film, she gets whacked on the skull by a steel door which must weigh half a ton - yet again, no blood, no bruise - she's the one worried about Superman's health!

Another issue is one which has plagued Superman from his creation - sometimes he is just too super for any real dramatic tension to be felt. Kryptonite is an attempt to ameliorate this, but still, you're watching a Superman movie. You know the bad guys aren't going to win. So it becomes a game of wait and see - what combination of events will result in story completion this time?

What really would be dramatic for a character such as Superman is the moral choices he has to make. Not whether he will succeed in this or that - since we're in the movie called Superman, we assume he will. But what if Superman chose not to do something? In one of the scenes in which Superman floats in space, listening to events below with his super hearing, the distinct sounds of an armed conflict can be heard. It's a war, somewhere in the world, probably somewhere with a lot of sand. Where does he fly to? A bank robbery. Why? It's never followed up on. Why not have Superman fly to Iraq to find himself ordered away by the administration? Or prevent some atrocity which he then takes the heat for? Superman being able to choose only a limited number of wrongs to right is interesting. Superman being pressured one way or another is interesting. Superman lifting yet another heavy object is much less so.

A corollary problem I had with the film was a writing choice in one scene - Lex and his henchmen beat a kryptonite-weakened Superman. As mentioned, this is Superman we're talking about, and Kryptonite is sort of a storytelling cheat to inject drama into a plot. But as Supes takes a beating, why not inject character drama instead of artificial drama into the scene? Superman did not fight back enough. Just before Lex pushed him off the cliff into the cold water below, why not have Superman try to throw a punch, fixed with a determination to fight no matter how weakened his state? Instead, he just keels over. Chance for drama lost.

While the homages to the Donner films were great, the atrocious Marlon Brando dialogue which was resurrected here really could have been trimmed. The fact that Routh is forced to recite some of it at the end is doubly painful. "My life will be lived through your eyes, as Yours will be lived through mine???" HUH?!? Seeing as how the film was dragging a wee bit long to begin with, some of this could have been mercifully cut for time.

All right, now on to the biggest potential problem.
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SPOILER ALERT!!!! DO NOT READ THIS SECTION IF YOU WANT TO WATCH THE MOVIE WITHOUT ANY FOREKNOWLEDGE!!!!
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(highlight the text to read it more easily)

Lois' child opens up a super-sized can of worms which will be difficult to close without severely altering the classic character dynamic or resorting to either cheesiness or weirdness in future installments of the series. Jason, Lois Lane's son, apparently by her Fiancee, has the question of his parentage raised about midway through the film by Lex Luthor. The question is definitively settled when little Jason hurls a grand piano at a baddie, and then in the denouement when Superman visits his bedside with the aforementioned maudlin Brando dialogue.

While I like the twist of Lois being a "single mom," and the kid himself is nowhere near as execrable as most child roles in movies, having a super-kid just opens a new story element waaaaaaayyyyy too big to address well. Will the next movie focus on him and Superman's relationship? Will he be Superboy or something? Will the screenwriters try to ignore all of this stuff and just say "well folks, he lost his powers, it was a fluke." Will they kill him off, cheaply and effectively nipping these issues in the bud?

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END SPOILER ALERT!!!! DON'T SCROLL UP IF YOU WANT TO WATCH THE MOVIE WITHOUT ANY FOREKNOWLEDGE!!!!
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Conclusion

In the end, regardless of any issues, nagging or pretty darn big, "Superman Returns" has the magic which makes movies fun. I was both thrilled and enchanted, something which hasn't happened simultaneously since I was about yay high. Just this fact alone makes it worth a movie ticket or a future DVD purchase.

However, it's not just a cheap thrill - Superman Returns makes you think and makes you feel, too. It works as a character story and it works as a reflection on Americana, hero worship, and alienation. The movie would work if it were stripped only to the paternity story of a returning lover horning in on an engaged couple and their son. The movie just works, period. I'd give it an 8 out of 10 for someone not steeped in Superman or comic books from childhood, and a 9 out of 10 if this kind of stuff is already your thing, as it is mine.

I wish George W. Bush were dead.

2006-05-05T17:04:00.000-07:00

A few years back, I began taking to a new catchphrase. "I wish George Bush were dead." Now, previous to about 2000, I had always kind of shied away from presidential death 'humor' or 'fervent hopes.' You know, respect for the office, the nation, all that.

But heck. Bush himself doesn't respect the office or the nation. And seeing as how he's the asshole who has systematically dismantled our civil liberties, haphazardly ballooned our national debt, callously committed thousands of lives to a commercially motivated boondoggle in Iraq, trodden upon the lives and livelihoods of countless innocent foreign nationals, lied every possible way about every possible subject to every possible audience... I have not wavered from that wish. I wish he were dead.

So now I'm curious. My blog is read probably by me and three or four other people, tops. Mostly, it's about ballparks and movies. Will anyone care if I shout from a middling rooftop of the internet... "I wish George W. Bush were dead?!"

See, I really do. I wish a fucking meteor would strike DC and just wipe it from the earth. I wish he'd go hunting with Cheney and get shot in his stupid monkey face. I wish he'd have been in Southeast Asia when the Tsunami hit. I wish he'd be in an overturning gas guzzling SUV accident. The world really would be better off. This man has been a pox on humanity. We are poorer for his having existed.

Now, just in case there is some sort of secret NSA web-snooping initiative to punish all wrong-thinking Americans, let me say, clearly and unequivocally: In no way, shape or form do I have any intention or plan to see my wishes carried out. I haven't the foggiest notion how to do it for one, and secondly, I am actually bound by these little things called ethics and morals. If George Bush and Adolph Hitler were hanging from a precipice, pleading for me to help them up, I'd do my best to try. But that's a whole Hume debate about moral inclinations and feelings. My point is: I have neither the werewithal nor the desire to actually carry out any plot against the president. I just have a vague, detached wish that something awful would happen to him. The aforementioned meteors, tsunamis, or any number of other poetically just deaths would do. Maybe being crushed by a vat of stem cells. Being involved in a fire at a Creationist museum. Or maybe contracting Alzheimers and rotting away like a fucking Ronald Rutebaga.

But am I free to say it? I WISH GEORGE W. BUSH WERE DEAD.

Or has he succeeded in his war against our civil liberties? Will I be punished in some way? Arrested?

I doubt it. I have neither the ego nor the paranoia to think so.

But in Bush's America, who the hell knows?

Slouching towards the big, slushy median

2006-01-02T23:03:00.000-08:00

I can scarcely believe what a fucking great movie Closer is. I watched it before this, with some friends, on my old tv. It was a great experience, and I enjoyed it, and thought it was great.

This evening, I popped it in, on my new, less spectacular TV, in my new, less spectacular apartment. I was just thinking "gee, I'll just watch a few minutes." Wanted to see what it looked like on my new set. Then whoops, the whole movie's gone by. Unbelievable.

It's probably fashionable to say it's the writing, and of course the writing is brilliant. It was adapted from a play IIRC, which shows in the production - almost all of the dialogue is contained in the 4 main characters. Which is fine. Epic movies are all well and good, but I think Hollywood hasforgotten how to write dialogue. Really good, crackling, terrific dialogue. Of which Closer is essentially one long string from beginning to end.

But equally brilliant is the acting. It's easy to dismiss Natalie Portman, saying "she plays the same role in every movie." But hey, really look at her performance. It is real. It rings true. She emotes the hell out of her role. Julia Roberts really opened my eyes, too. Jude Law can't be dismissed as a pretty boy, though I think his is the weakest of the four performances. It can be difficult to believe him as an intellectual. But he's still quite good. Clive Owen "chews the scenery," as they say. He is the uber-male here, and it rings true.

Wow. What can I say. Writing to be emulated. Good looking film, well shot, with good music, too. Why don't more movies like this get made? I guess the market dictates it. And apparently the market is made up of daft poltroons who want their plots simple and their theaters loud and blasting with arctic cold A/C.

Hopefully DVD or whatever digital distribution model takes its place will keep a market alive for films with brains. Books, too. Sigh. The plight of the intellectual or even just the person of refined tastes, in a society that elevates nincompoopery to the status of the highest goods, and relegates anyone with a glimmer of insight to the fringes, whather in high school, the workplace, media, politics, whatever.

Should I end every entry in this blog from now on with "fucking assholes, they deserve what they've gotten?"

Maybe so.

Oh, that Bush...

2005-12-21T09:41:00.000-08:00

So, let me get this straight - George Bush illegally orders spying on thousands of Americans without probable cause or judicial restraint, thus breaking his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the constitution."

Bill Clinton gets a blowjob (without even a pop shot in Monica's mouth, if the Starr Report is to be believed), and maybe sort of tries to fudge about it to a jury.

Which one gets impeached?

Fucking assholes, this country. We deserve what we've gotten.

DVD Review: Alexander, Director's Cut

2005-08-22T12:20:00.000-07:00

It's kind of funny how popular entertainment works. All I remember hearing about Oliver Stone's "Alexander" is that it was a horribly acted, poorly constructed shambles of a movie. I can't say these sentiments made me stay away from the theater, because it doesn't take me much to stay away - my home theater is better than 50% of the movie theaters out there. Scanning the torrent of vituperative scorn heaped upon this film will give you an idea of the climate at the time of its release. Needless to say, I was dubious. Any movie that scores lower than Dukes of Hazzard must be an abomination, right?

However, I am a Stone fan, and was inclined to offer the benefit of the doubt. I loved JFK, Nixon and Natural Born Killers, and enjoyed Any Given Sunday and The Doors. I think Stone is the type of director who naturally inspires these sorts of reviews - almost every film of his tops out at over 3 hours, which nets the "bloated" tag from jaded reviewers, and his stories are often extremely ambitions, which often nets the "convoluted" moniker. But for the most part, these knocks aren't valid, or they don't really describe the essence of Stone's best. At his best, Stone excels at getting truly absorbing character portraits up on the screen, and setting them against an expansive backdrop which captures the essence of the period.

Alexander, starring Collin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Anthony Hopkins, Jared Leto and Christopher Plummer, both succeeds and fails in these categories. Some of the characters are endlessly fascinating, some are rather threadbare. Certain aspects of the period are wonderfully represented, and some are sort of left up to the viewer to fill in the blanks. Some performances are pitch perfect, others, while enjoyable, are painfully weird and outof place. All said, Alexander is probably Stone's weakest film.

So why did I enjoy it so much?

Looking at the above-listed stars, it's easy to see that Stone has assembled a particularly good ensemble cast. The weakest of the bunch are Farrell and Jolie. However, each actor does an admirable job of creating a character, Farrell and Jolie included. If anything, Jolie's performance is hampered only by her youth (she is only one year Farrell's senior, yet plays his mother), and her wretched accent (somewhere between Eartha Kitt and Austin Powers' Frau Farbissina). Farrell's performance is just a bit shallow - he looks somewhat heroic and manly, but doesn't do much beyond that. He knots his brow and emotes, but doesn't make us empathize.

The rest of the cast, however, inclduing the lesser-known supporting players in Alexander's army, are uniformly terrific. Particularly good are Plummer as Aristotle, Kilmer as a drunken King Philip, Hopkins as an aged Ptolemy, and Jared Leto as Alexander's male lover, Hephaistion. Rosario Dawson plays Alexander's asian bride Roxane, though beyond her pendulous naked breasts and dancing ability, I can't say I got much out of it (Dawson really shines in 2005's Sin City, though). To me, though, the performance that makes the movie what it is is by Connor Paolo, as a young Alexander. This 14 year-old actor absolutely nails the protrayal of a young, idealistic prince with adolescent dreams of grandeur. This portrayal really lends a depth to the later plot, acted by Farrell, which Farrell himself really doesn't provide.

But any Stone movie review eventually comes down to Stone himself. How well did he construct the story, and how well did he execute it and edit it together?

My main gripe with the story of Alexander is its naivete. I really have to wonder how historically accurate it is to portray Alexander as an idealistic dreamer who longed to unite the world in a Pax Romana-esque explosion of culture and personal improvement. Certainly, all of these things may have been present in the man, and they may have been ancillary effects of his conquest, but it is pretty tough to swallow as Farrell dreamily describes his vision of a great society to his male lover Leto. The story functions much better when Alexander is instead portrayed as a conqueror impelled by his family demons to push across the globe for something he knows not what.

The film is truly wondrous at times in its evocation of ancient times and places - Babylon is a singular cinematic achievement - utilizing CGI nearly seamlessly to truly give them impression of a "wonder of the world." Similarly teriffic cinematography and compisition are achieved in portrayals of India, Egypt and the steppes of the Himalayas.

On the other hand, the film truly fails to portray Macedonia, Greece, and any of the Alexandria cities. The Alexandrias in particular are a notable absence - they are referenced numerous times in expository dialogue, but never seen. This is a huge mistake in my book, as they would have communicated a sense of what Alexander's conquests actually achieved in a socio-historical sense. Instead, we are stuck with a travelogue (enjoyable though it may be) of Alexander's adventures with his army, and no context to ground it in. As far as Macedonia and Greece, these scenes are limited to a palace interior, a few columns by which Aristotle teaches young nobles, a wrestling pit, and a performance arena. And while they are all well done sets (I particularly appreciated the use of "illuminated" wooden sculpture, a very accurate portrayal of the times), they do little to communicate the scope of the Hellenistic world from which the principal actors sprang. It seems as if Stone's powerful cinematic vision is reserved more for the sweeping vistas of Asia - regrettable in terms of context, though as I said, still enjoyable to watch.

I for one really liked the way the so-called "gay" element of the movie was handled - watching Alexander provides one of the better explications of the homosexual "lover-beloved" relationships that were present in Hellenistic noble circles. Again, this concept was grounded by scenes of the young Alexander and Hephaiston being taught by Aristotle about the idealistic virtues of manly love - scenes which brought into sharp focus what could have seemed gratuitous homoerotic later scenes between Leto, Farrell, and a few others.

A technical note on the DVD - I rented the "Director's Cut," which was presented on one disc. I noticed some compression artifacts and edge enhancement which really detracted from an otherwise spectacular pallate. I have read that the theatrical cut is spread over two discs, and is 15 minutes or so longer. Apparently, Stone cut the flashbacks in a different order for the Director's cut. I look forward to renting the theatrical cut and comparing them in terms of quality and effectiveness.

Alexander is an enigmatic movie. It fails at so much, but only because it tried for so much. I was completely absorbed and never bored once during the 3 hours plus running time. I felt transported to the world it created, and my emotions were stirred in a simplistic way by the scenes of glory and adventure on the screen. This might be the best way to describe it - a fourteen year-old might think this was the greatest movie ever. It functions the way the best comic books or video games might - putting forward a simple story of heroism and adventure with tremendous elan and gusto.

Ptolemy (played by Hopkins) utters a line which might serve as the movie's epitaph: "His failures were grander than others' successes." So true of Stone. He wears his ambition on his sleeve, is rarely if ever subtle, and draws a lot of critical fire for this. Yet the explosion of creativity which results, whether it succeeds or fails, is never boring. I recommend Alexander for this reason alone. 7 of 10.

Scientology: Galactic Overlord Xenu Strikes Back!

2005-06-30T13:14:00.000-07:00

All this talk about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes has put Scientology into the fore of entertainment media lately.

Let me say about Tom Cruise - the man is obviously a simpleton to a very high degree. Yes, Tom, I'm sure you have studied the history of psychology and read research studies on Ritalin. Uh huh.

I personally attended a Scientology "sales pitch" with my friend Phil - they have a Lincoln Park office in Chicago, and we decided to go for shits and giggles. It was without a doubt the dumbest crock of shit I've ever been exposed to in my life - and I've watched entire presidential debates, mind you. In addition to the vapidity of the idology espoused, there was plain-faced con artistry at work, as well. Perhaps I'll describe my experience in a little while. Right now, some links to chew on.

Here is an interesting read. It is a biography of L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology's deranged and criminally insane founder. Here is a summary of the "religion's" tenets and history. Here is Scientology's official site.

Here are two tracts written by a victim of Scientology. One is a narrative account, the other is a more scholarly analysis.

Unbelievably fascinating reading which should put you off of ever wanting to pay admission for a Tom Cruise or John Travolta movie ever again.

I am interested in meeting and talking to a living, breathing scientologist, whether currently practicing, or "defected." Contact me, Matthew Weflen, at matthewweflen at yahoo dot com.

Comerica Park: Diamond in the very very rough

2005-06-29T14:40:00.000-07:00

Tell someone you are traveling to Detroit, and you're liable to get all sorts of interesting reactions. "Detroit? God, Why?!" Or, "I'll never go back there again." Or, "When can I plan on attending your funeral?"

I had never been there before planning this mini-trip to see a Sox game there this Tuesday. All told, it was definitely on the cheap side: about $40 for a round trip Amtrak ticket, $68 for a room, and $18 for 2 upper deck tickets to the game. Throw in two cab rides and a dinner, and it was probably a $150 experience. So perhaps my perceptions are diluted a bit by my happy inner budget-hound - but Detroit didn't seem all that bad. Sure, the room was dingy, the streets were deserted at midday and pockmarked like Serajevo in the mid 90s, and people seemed to kind of loll around in a dreamy haze, unaware of their surroundings. All of these things are bad, to be sure.

Maybe it was my visit to Comerica Park that has me so happy about my time.

Pricing: on the whole, prices are quite average for MLB in the Midwest. There are, however, some great deals to be had: $8 bleacher seats, $12 UDR seats, and $5 "Skyline" UD corner seats. The best element of the pricing is the Monday through Thursday 2-for-1 UDR deal - essentially making $12 seats $6 for all weeknight games. This is a model for what the White Sox ought to do - at the game I attended, people were distributed evenly throughout the park, but UD and LD - which is quite a stark contrast to Comiskey's packed LD and tumbleweed-blowing UD. An interesting section is the Lower Deck Terrace: extra wide wooden seats with tables next to them, and food/drink service. I have not really seen this before - they ring the lower deck right by the concourse, so they offer quite a good view.

Another boon to the budget-conscious was the quite reasonable selection of concessions and prices. $5 for a beer and $3.50 for a dog or slice of pizza represent a slight discount over other prices I’ve seen. By far the most popular item, however, based on my seeing it in about 40% of every fan’s hands, were the Extra Tall Daiquiri cups for $7. You get a half-liter of the daiquiri flavor of your choice – in a huge barbell shaped cup with an extra-long straw.

Seats at Comerica are pitched very pleasantly – I never had a problem seeing home plate, regardless of whether someone sat in front of me. The seats themselves are comfortable, though not the pinnacle in my opinion. Every chair has a cup holder – including chairs on aisles – they each have a cup holder very thoughtfully attached to the armrest. Little touches like these abound at Comerica.

For the kids and/or just the baseball-uninclined, there is a spacious picnic and “carnival” area – replete with baseball-themed Ferris Wheel and hedge sculptures, as well as oodles, veritable prides of Tiger statues dotting both the inside and outside of the park. Speaking of exteriors, Comerica’s is very nice. There is an attached parking garage for the drivers out there, and walking around the stadium structure was quite pleasant – the field itself is recessed down under street level, which allows pedestrians to view the game from the sidewalk surrounding the outfield. Architecturally, from both inside and out, Comerica is a very pleasant, well-thought out, integrated experience.

Detroit may look like crap to walk through, but from the ballpark, the view is idyllic. Downtown ballparks with skyline views are my new absolute favorite thing. It just so perfectly captures the true essence of baseball – the idealized escape from the urban, and lets the civic identity of a team and its host really shine.

Fans were quite pleasant – walking away from a crushing Tiger loss, one would have been hard pressed to tell whether anyone was disappointed, thrilled, or feeling much of anything at all. This further contributed to my image of Detroitans as a bunch of lurching, shell-shocked zombies… but hey, when you’re visiting an opposing park, it’s nice not to be hassled.

All in all, Comerica Park is a baseball venue that does nothing badly and some things particularly well. It should be the model for any open-air downtown baseball stadium. Now, as for the city...

Seat comfort: 4 - All seats I sampled were pitched very nicely, and had unobstructed views.
Concessions: 4 - Very good prices ameliorate so-so quality.
Scoreboard: 4 - The board had plenty of info, but the typeface was quite small, and the "jumbo" tron was anything but. The out of town scoreboard was large and up-to-date.
P.A. system: 5 - Finally, someone gets it right - kept at the perfect volume to avoid distortion. Everything was crystal clear..
Ticket Prices: 4 - Average most places, but good deals exist for cheapos like me.
Exterior Architecture: 5 - This park is a joy to look at from the outside, especially its field view sidwalk in the OF.
Interior Arch.: 4 - The view was to die for. The concourses were easily navigable. Downtick for super-narrow exit ramps which held us up when leaving.
Access: 3 - Parking was an atrocious $20 for drivers. Walking to and from the park was no problem, and there are some decent eats nearby. On the other hand, straying too far was a rather frightening concept...
Ushers: 4 - The ushers were friendly and never got in the way.
Trading up: 4 - Fans can access all levels. UD trading up was extremely easy, despite the pretty good attendance up there - I was behind home plate in $20 seats for the whole game, when I paid $6 for the LF side.

Points out of 50: 41

Miller Park: The Same Old Garbage in a Shiny New Can

2005-06-28T12:11:00.000-07:00

The title quote is from my Uncle Tom, a long-suffering Brewers fan (who haven't had a winning season since 1992) who likes the park, but hates the management, the team, the pervading aura of failure, etc.

It's tough to disagree there. Luckily for fans of the Brew Crew, new management has come into town, and has both increased payroll and made some exciting trades which look to at least elevate the Brewers into .500 territory. I couldn't be happier, since: 1. Their fans deserve it, and 2. They play the Cubs 19 times or so. Go Brewers!

On to the park. Miller Park benefits from that glorious hybrid of modern stadium design, the retractable roof. It's the most distinctive architectural feature present - a giant green roof which spreads apart radially from the center behind home plate. Closed during cold weather, the park still gets loads of natural light, owing to the huge vaulted windows around the UD and OF. Open, it allows for a natural grass field and a perfectly outdoor baseball experience. Man, I wish we had one of these puppies at Comiskey when it's 35 degrees in April.

Ticket prices are shockingly high for a team which hasn't cracked the cellar for such a long time. Gone are the $1 "Bob Eucker seats" which ringed the top of the UD. New management must have been leery of an otherwise empty UD being upgraded into by $1 skinflints. (I'd sure do it...)

The only true budget area now is Bernie's Terrace, for $5 during regular games and $8 "marquee" games (no relation to former Brewer Marquis Grissom, mostly they're games against the Flubbies.) OF "Bleacher" seats are available for $10-$15, but I can tell you from experience that these seats are hardly worth it. They have obstructed views of the OF, and are about as close to the action as a tailgate party in the parking lot. The best "deal" would be "Terrace Reserved" UD seats for $12-$15. Get them behind home plate in the UD and you'll be doing fine.

The best seats in the house IMHO are the "Loge Infield" and Loge Diamond" boxes, 200 level, for $20-$32. These seats are slightly elevated above the LD (some are even more expensive, which bears out my judgment of their quality), offering a tremendous view of the action. I sat in 211 for a Preseason game against the Sox this year (pictures to come).

The main issue with seats in the OF at Miller Park is their obstructed nature. I am assuming that these decks were built so far inwards owing to the roughly cylindrical shape of the building, to accommodate the roof. Unfortunately, this means that you can never see both foul poles at once unless you are in the 30% of the park or so by home plate. The further you go down the line, the less you can see of your OF corner.

Concessions are high in quality and midrange in prices. The bratwurst in particular can't be beat, with optional kraut and brown mustard. Beer is available in plastic bottles, which is nice, considering how much it sucks to have a cloud of someone's peanut shavings drift into your lidless beer cup. It also prevent spillage from spasmodic Cubs fans.

In-game entertainment is standard fare except for the famed Sausage Races. In this delightful distraction, 4 sausages (German, Italian, Polish and Hot Dog) race from foul pole to foul pole around the diamond. An emasculated Bernie Brewer, who used to slide into a giant mug of beer at old County Stadium now slides down a slide and waves a flag when the Brewers hit a homer. The scoreboard is very nice, but a little high in the stratosphere and far away for comfortable viewing.

Bathrooms and concourses are particularly nice at Miller. I swear, some of these bathrooms resemble the cleanest airport restrooms you've ever seen. Concourses are extremely wide with plenty of space for concession lines. This I'm sure owes to the aforementioned cylindrical construction of the park.

Milwaukee fans are middle of the pack as far as making your visit enjoyable. There are a lot of families, which is nice, but public drunkenness is definitely a pronounced feature. And some of these Milwaukee residents are folks you don't want to mess with, take my word for it.

Pre, Post, and during-game Tailgating is the thing du jour in Miller's extremely copious and relatively affordable parking lots. The smells of all sorts of roast carcass can be picked up wafting in the breeze. The lots are so big, there's a bathroom stop at the halfway point.

Seat comfort: 5 - Cup holders, good views, and TEMPERATE CONDITIONS ALL YEAR make Miller a tough park to beat for comfort.
Concessions: 4 - The brats rock. Beer has some variety (but non-Miller products are hard to find), and is priced very average for MLB. You'd think they'd cut you a deal since the park is named for a brewery...
Scoreboard: 3 - Nice and pretty, but very remote.
P.A. system: 4 - Good sound system is aided by interior acoustics.
Ticket Prices: 3 - Pretty bad considering the Brewers' atrocious record.
Exterior Architecture: 4.5 - This park is seriously pretty from the outside. The Roof is a sight to see. Only a very bland outfield wall brings this down a half-tick.
Interior Arch.: 4 - Sight lines are impaired by verticality of construction. Otherwise sweet. Concourses are to die for.
Access: 5 - The largest parking lot you've ever seen, right off the freeway. No problemo.
Ushers: 3 - There were ushers? Oh yeah. LD ushers watch people like a hawk.
Trading up: 3 - Fans can access all levels. LD ushers are very stingy about trading up, however. Go for the UD.

Points out of 50: 38.5

Wrigley Field, Or, To Hell and Back

2005-06-27T16:19:00.000-07:00

OH, Wrigley Field, how we long to sing your praises, you shrine of baseball you, which houses that holiest of baseball teams, the Cubs, and their holy trinity of Wood, Prior and Zambrano, who will most surely deliver us from evil into a World Series berth, once Wood wins more than 14 a year, that is, which is Sure To Happen, because we have been so Faithful.....

BARF. You might think Barf sums up Wrigley Field and its legion of delusional acolytes, but PISS is a better descriptor. For Wrigley truly is The Urinal of Baseball.

Wrigley, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways...

Ticket prices would already be bad enough, the 2nd highest in the MLB, if it weren't for the added punch in the nuts of the Cubs scalping their own tickets for more than face value! What with the thousand dollar premiums these set-aside tickets command, prices would easily average the highest in the majors.

Oh, but let's be fair here. The Cubs offer 6 "Value" dates for which obstructed view UD seats go for $6. Those wonderful souls. I mean, they only have 40 "Prime" dates and 35 "Regular" dates. But you have to pay a premium for "prime games," right? Half the season, that is...

So let's say you actually find some tickets, win the lottery or something, and go to a game. What can you expect while there? Why, it's baseball's grand "way back" machine, in which intrusive advertisements do not exist, all the views are wonderful, and that old-timey feel just seeps into your bones. Right?

WRONG.

I will admit, the field itself looks pretty nice, and the views from about 40% of the seats are good. But man, you ever sit in one of those under-the-overhang seats in the LD where 30% of your view is of wonderful, old-timey Steel Pole, and you have to crane your neck at about an 80 degree angle for 3 hours, while your back is ground to a fine powder by the torture device seats, and you'll have a new appreciation for molded plastic and no-pole concrete construction. And nothing gives you that old time feeling of childhood better than staring at someone's head for 3 hours, just like when you were 5 years old. The ~1.5 degree pitch of the grandstand assures you of this.

If you ever get caught in a rain delay, kiss your hard earned money blown on scalped tickets goodbye - Wrigley Field has by far the worst grounds crew in baseball, at least that I've ever seen. I mean, people, it's a frickin' tarp. How hard could it be? Yes, I know these people need jobs too, but seriously... Just yesterday a game was cancelled and rescheduled for a doubleheader because of spotty showers which abated completely by 4 PM. Last year, they were so inefficient covering the field, a game against the Sox was called in the 5th, followed by 6 hours of sunny, perfect conditions.

It's still worth it, the faithful say. You can never appreciate a ballpark until you accept those quirks and idiosyncrasies. Or until a chunk of conrete burrows into your skull.

And what's not to love about the concourse which runs beneath the grandstand? As you try to exit the park after a game, there is no better feeling than rubbing elbows, armpits, stomachs, and external genitalia with thousands of the other faithful as you try to cram your way out one of the three tiny exits onto the street. And you haven't had a beer spilt on you until you've experienced it in the dank underground cavern of the Wrigley concourse. And you haven't gone to the bathroom until you've peed in a trough facing a 400 pound drunkard in a Cubbie mini-tee. Or heck, peeing into the sink is a fun diversion if the line for a half-foot wide trough berth extends out the door. That is, if the bathroom isn't closed due to flooding or overcrowding. In that happy event, relieving yourself on a neighboring building is the pee du jour.

Wrigley Field is located conveniently in a neighborhood once known as Lakeview, now known as "Wrigleyville." Oh, it's big fun to try and drive, eat, stroll along public ways, or generally live in this area, especially on game days/nights.

Cubs Fans are part of the Wrigley experience as well.

What is a day at the ballpark without seeing 5 year olds exposed to rowdy and randy fratboys shouting obscenities to nubile betube-topped scatterbrains fresh from a gray-market Girls Gone Wild video? And now that Sammy has flown the coop to Baltimore, the chants of "Beer Man!" and "What Just Happened?" are all the more audible. It's a veritable symphony of remedial baseball education.

All right, enough of this. I could go on for days. Let's get to the ratings.

Seat comfort: 2 - Designed in an age when Hobbits roamed the Earth, these seats are a surefire ticket to a chiropractic appointment. The grandstands have a very low pitch, making for a nice close-up view of the back of someone's head if they're over 4'10".
Concessions: 3 - Average food at high prices. The Foot long Chili Dog is a pretty good deal.
Scoreboard: 4 - It is kind of neat looking. Thank you Bill Veeck! Not enough info, however.
P.A. system: 4 - What there is sounds perfectly nice.
Ticket Prices: 2 - One way or another, the Tribune Company will f$*% you a new one - they scalp their own tickets. Don't drop the Soap in the restroom! UD is not awful, pricewise, but everything else is.
Exterior Architecture: 3 - Blah, blah and more blah. There's a lighted sign, but that's about it.
Interior Arch.: 3 - Profoundly uncomfortable, this is a torture chamber for all the senses. Only a passable field shape and that wonderful "old timey" feel brings this up a few ticks.
Access: 2 - A hellish labyrinth of human flesh. Parking is obscenely difficult. Drunken yahoos trip you up at every step. Only decent CTA access brings this up a tick.
Ushers: 5 - Actually, some of the nicest 90 year-olds you'll ever meet.
Trading up: 2 - Too many vacant-eyed lemmings to even consider.

Points out of 50: 30

Comiskey Park II: No, I'm not about to start calling it whatever cellphone it's named after...

2005-06-26T11:59:00.000-07:00

Ah, Comiskey part deux U.S. SoxPark Cellular Telephone Field. Or whatever they're trying to get us to call it now. The much-maligned "last of the futuristic ballparks", just missing the retro-crazy boat begun by Camden in Baltimore.

A few words of preface - Personally, I like some of the futuristic parks. Kaufman Stadium in KC, which Comiskey II was supposedly modeled after, is a gorgeous example of modern stadium architecture. Roofed stadia like Miller Park, Safeco and Bank One are not exactly retro, either, but fans love their charms and their conveniences. I think retro is overrated. What Retro really means is dank concourses, awful bathrooms, obstructed and uncomfortable seats, and awful fan access (Just wait, my Wrigley Field review is coming...)

So let's give "The Cell" an unbiased treatment, eh?

As far as tickets go, the good news is there are usually plenty available. Like, 20,000 or so. The Sox suffer in Chicago from an unfriendly media, a lower-income fan base, and a very negative perception of both the park and the surrounding neighborhood in Chicago (Let's set aside for the moment that crime rates are actually higher around the Urinal... whoops, I mean Wrigley...)

The bad news is, the tickets are generally overpriced. There are several budget promotions, but you have to be a fan 'in the know' to really take advantage. Mondays are half-priced (9 dates in all, you can see me there in Section 520, $7), While Tuesdays (12 dates) are 2 for 1 in the Upper Deck with a Pepsi product or UPC at the gate. See what I mean? Deals exist, but they make you work for them. On the other side of the coin, there are tiered "Prime", "Premier" and "Cubs" dates, which inflate the price of a normally $14 UD ticket to an obscene $28. Paying for parking is also a bad idea - as it runs $17. $3.50 will get you there and back on the CTA Red Line, less than a block from the park.

Adding insult to injury are the new "Scout Seats," which take about 200 formerly $40 seats and turn them into new, "exclusive" $170-200 seats. This, you see, is to add "value" for the fans. Your ass now has a pad under it, and you get parking, a restaurant-style dinner, and in-seat service for the price. Not that this is the worst deal ever (considering parking and concession prices), but it's just another rip against the budget conscious fan, of which the Sox have a plenitude.

Luckily, the Sox' very healthy scalper contingent will cut you a deal on most seats on the day of game. If you go this route, do NOT pay face or higher! Know your market, my friends. Best bet: Look for fans scalping extras. It should be pretty evident who the fans are and who the "professional" scalpers are. A fan will usually cut you a nice deal on their extras. Lord knows I've done it! Some words of caution, however: despite the fact that tumbleweeds blow through the seats half the time, Sox brass and security personnel are very strict about enforcing scalping rules, trying to sell parking passes, looking at them cockeyed, or breathing in the wrong direction. Many are off duty cops with a yen to harrass good, honest, hard-working folk like you and me. I recommend making all your transactions either online (craigslist.com or whitesoxinteractive.com are good bets) or on 35th street west of the railroad bridge - i.e. off Comiskey Park property.

Once inside though, you and your lighter wallet should enjoy things pretty well. Sox fans by and large are some of the best-informed, wittiest, and most passionate fans around. (Ahem.) Yes, they'll pound your ass if you wear Cubs paraphernalia. But what's so bad about that?

Views were originally unobstructed throughout, though after renovation some UD seats and a few CF seats now have minor obstructions. For budget-hounds, 520 and 544 close-up offer very nice views. Behind home plate in the UD is more expensive, but really offers a great view. On the lower deck, anything within the bases in the LD is pretty much golden. As you get into the foul lines and OF seats, however, the angle becomes a little uncomfortable. If it's a choice between a $14 UD seat and a $30 one down the line, I heartily recommend the UD tix for your neck's sake.

If you do spring for LD tix, a nice place to check out is the Fan Deck in center field. This is right above the batters eye, and offers bar style seating with a unique view of the park. Currently, Jerry Reinsdork and the whiz-kids in Sox marketing have not yet made people pay to go here. I advise you check it out before they do. Also fun for the kiddies is the new "FUNdamentals" section - sort of a mini baseball clinic for kids, with hitting, catching, and running instruction. This is located in a new grandstand thing over on the LF concourse.

Concourses and bathrooms are spacious, copious and clean. Rarely will you get caught in a big fan bottleneck (even on sellout days - yes they do happen, the Sox draw around 2 million a season).

Comiskey's food has long been thought the superior of Chicago's 2 parks. I can't disagree. For variety and for price, Comiskey far outstrips Wrigley. Dogs, Polish, brats, burgers, pizza, churros, elephant ears, cotton candy, ice cream, it's all good. Thursdays are dollar dog days, btw. For you carnivores out there, I highly recommend the Char Polish with Grilled Onions, available both LD and UD. Then I recommend a bypass operation. But I digress. Beer is Miller brand (bleargh), except for the "beers of the world" booth I can never seem to find. It runs $5.50.

On the in-game entertainment front, it's a mixed bag. There is way too much canned music for my taste, and the sound system is cranked to an ear-splitting, uncomfortable level, which leaves anything you actually wish to hear rife with distortion. For instance, strains of AC-DC will be seared into your cochlea for the rest of your life, while you'll be straining to hear what the heck Joey Cora says in "Who would play you in a movie?" The long-time organist, Nancy Faust, should be featured much more than she is. The scoreboard is in the middle of the pack as far as information goes. Out of town scores can be pretty out of date, as well. The video board is gorgeous, even when playing one of the Sox' many interminably long pregame videos.

Souvenirs and scorecards are average for a ballpark, expect to pay $30 for a hat inside the park. Better deals for those in the know can be found 2 blocks west on 35th Street, at the "Grandstand" store. You can find hats for $20-$25 there.

Trading up is nigh to impossible at Comiskey II, which really galls me on a half-full day. For one thing, Upper Deck patrons are not allowed on the 100 level - a fan-unfriendly move if I ever saw one. Then, you have innumerable red-shirted drones pestering you to see your ticket. Sigh.

All in all, if you're willing to go a little out of the way both in terms of location and in terms of scouting out a deal, a Sox game is a superior baseball experience to the Flubbies up north. You'll pay less, have far less beer/vomit/urine splashed on you, and see a better team to boot.

The ratings:

Seat comfort: 4 - Most angles are favorable. New green seats are being installed throughout the season, so we'll see on this one. The current Blue seats are comfy compared to the average MLB seat.
Concessions: 5 - Some great stuff mixed with some average stuff. Prices are medium to low for MLB. Thursdays have dollar dogs.
Scoreboard: 4 - The originators of the "exploding" scoreboard, but it could use more info. And a clock which is visible from all seats (the current clock is obstructed to all but patrons in the UD).
P.A. system: 3 - Cranked to deafening levels of noise and distortion.
Ticket Prices: 3 - Deals exist, but they make you scrounge for it. Plenty of scalpers will "help" you out.
Exterior Architecture: 4 - A nice new Bauhaus-inspired UD windscreen and a new roof really spruced this place up.
Interior Arch.: 4 - Great seat locations/views, uninspiring views of the surroundings - turn the damn thing North!
Access: 5 - Easy in, easy out for CTA Red Line patrons, loads of pricey parking as well. Green Line is also close, making access a breeze even on the most crowded days.Sidewalks and concourses surrounding the park are spacious and well-landscaped.
Ushers: 3 - Not the brightest bulbs in the batch, but they do allow water and snacks to be carried in.
Trading up: 2 - Very restrictive and unfriendly policies. There are seats to be had though if you know how to act inconspicuously.

Points out of 50: 37

Jacobs Field - colder than witches' teats, but warm and fuzzy in spirit

2005-06-25T11:03:00.000-07:00

Well, I just got back from CLE to watch the Sox win Cleveland's home opener. Woo hoo!

In honor of my having visited three parks in the last two weeks, I've decided to start my own Ballpark tour diary. So first I'll do Cleveland, since I'm essentially fresh off the plane.

"The Jake" as it is affectionately called by Clevelanders, is a pretty nice park, I must say. It has good seats for cheap ($10 in the LF upper deck, $6 around the corner in RF), a very pretty downtown location, and lots of dedicated fans who show up pretty regularly.

My initial seats Monday were in section 575 , which is reasonably priced at $10. The view is nice, almost even with the infield. Unfortunately, for a day game, it is squarely in the shade the whole time - which, combined with a -50 degree arctic wind off of Lake Erie in April, made for a very unenjoyable time.

So my party and I moved all the way around to section 504, which was in the sun. Good lord, what a difference that made. These $6 seats have a bit of obstruction, as you can't see the RF corner. But all in all, since amputation of my extremities was avoided, it was a nice upgrade. I was especially pleased that there were no security goons trying to block the seat switch - one of my absolute pet peeves at a ballpark - especially if you are 'downgrading' in terms of price. On the downside, Cleveland security does NOT allow a fan to take a bottle of water into the park - a blatant price gouge if I ever saw one. Niehter do they allow umbrellas - apparently in response to the rash of umbrella-rifle sniper incidents suffered by ballparks of late.

Cleveland concessions are squarely in the middle to upper-middle of baseball prices. A dog was $3.75, beer was $5.75 (I did not partake, owing to my near death from exposure). A blanket was $40, and a program with scorecard was $2 (I wanted just a scorecard for $1, but I was too incoherent from freezing to complain). One particularly good deal was the bratwurst basket - a brat, pickle, and heaping helping of fried for $5.25. The layout of the UD concourse made things difficult, as there were many rolling booths placed directly opposite permanent concession stands - making for a big cluster-f@#$ of frozen fans as we tried to make our way around the concourse to the sweet sweet embrace of the sun.

Cleveland fans were pleasant and into the game. I don't think I heard one swear word uttered, and only a few obviously drunk fratboys were in evidence (just wait for my Wrigley Field review...) I am told that Injuns' tix were impossible to score in the 90s, but are a bit easier now (I was at their opening day, so I guess so.)

Okay, so let's try this the ESPN way as linked above. I cut out a few categories that they have, since I never buy certain things and some seem redundant.

Seat comfort: 4 - Nothing mind blowing, but both seats I sat in were pitched nicely and were not uncomfortable.
Concessions: 4 - Average across the board. The dog I had was good, but pricey. Availability was extremely spotty. Good deals on combo meals make up for it, though. Fresh squeezed lemonade is a nice touch.
Scoreboard: 4 - A nice big color job with loads of stats, easily seen from all angles.
P.A. system: 3 - Tinny, distorted and annoying. Average for MLB parks.
Ticket Prices: 4 - The Indians have some good deals for budget hounds. Their LD tix, however, are a terrible deal.
Exterior Architecture: 4 - The outside is relatively uninspiring compared to the interior. There are, however,some neat ways to look into the park from the street.
Interior Arch.: 4 - Downtown views. Can't complain. Nice concourses except for the line mishaps, good bathrooms. Some obstructed views bump this down a tad (note the RF picture above)
Access: 4 - Nice downtown location, plenty of people willing to gouge for parking.
Ushers: 3 - Minus points for not allowing water or umbrellas. Plus points for not being seat hawks..
Trading up: 4 - No problems even on opening day. Sweet!

Points out of 50: 38

The death of the American movie theater, or, Lady, quit kicking my goddamn chair!

2005-06-21T12:14:00.000-07:00

Hollywood types and general gadabouts (like me) have been pondering and/or fretting the apparent demise of the movie industry – specifically, the practice of actually going to a movie theater to watch a film.

2005, it turns out, represents a tremendous financial slump year in cinema, even with summer “blockbusters” like Star Wars Episode 3 and Batman Begins in theaters - the word “blockbuster” referring to those bygone days when a popular movie would actually have people lining up around the block to see a film.

Many blame the slump to the rise of “home theaters” and DVD sales; some cite the spiraling costs of going to the theater; while others point to the worthless chum being spewed out by studios, mixed liberally with 30 minutes of advertising before the show. Each of these perspectives has merit.

I for one can confirm all of these impulses: I have seen 3 first-run movies this year: Million Dollar Baby (eh), Star Wars Episode 3 (double eh), and Batman Begins (pretty good). I plan to purchase the DVD releases for two of these (the latter two). So in this respect, Hollywood has gotten their dollar out of me – probably $25 for the movie tickets themselves, with another $35 or $40 on the DVD sales.

However, I can name many other recent movies that I did not see in the theater, and am waiting for the DVD release: The Life Aquatic (which I recently purchased on DVD) and Sin City. Also in the recent past are: The Royal Tenenbaums, LOTR: The Two Towers, Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions, among a plethora of others. In fact, the only reason I saw the movies I did in the theater was in the case of Million Dollar Baby, idle boredom, and the latter two, actual excitement to see the films, which couldn’t wait for the DVD release.

What was my thinking? Quite frankly, my personal home theater provides a highly enjoyable and immersive movie experience, and its benefits outweigh the flawed theater-going experience: while the theater screen is large and the sound is good, the floors are sticky, other patrons can be noisy and intrusive, and I am forced to watch 30 minutes of commercials before the film. I would rather pay $20 to own a movie I know I’ll enjoy and watch multiple times in a controlled environment than pay $9 to see it once, with commercials, with innumerable variables which can detract from my enjoyment.

What does home theater represent in terms of American life? I can confirm that it includes a sense of misanthropy and isolationism – While I’m sure you are a swell person and a fine citizen, I don’t want to sit next to you in a theater and listen to you chew your popcorn or make witty asides to your companion. People suck, and are generally worthy of both derision and avoidance. For instance, I saw the first LOTR movie in an IMAX theater. It is certainly an entertaining movie and was capably projected – however, the incessant pounding of a grown adult woman’s feet into the back of my chair for 3 straight fucking hours diminished my enjoyment just a smidgen.

Is something irretrievably lost by not going to the theater? Is there some communal aspect of film enjoyment that withers and pales alone at home? Bah, humbug, I say. If you’re the type than needs a laugh track to know when a TV comedy is funny, then perhaps here is something lost. Otherwise, you ought to know what is scary, what is funny, and what is thrilling on your own.

The notion that home theaters have come close to killing movie houses may be true - back when TV first appeared, movie-makers switched to 70mm "Cinemascope" and "Panavision" formats, in addition to 3D, in an attempt to prevent just this sort of audience loss to home theaters. In recent years, however, no similar strategy has been undertaken to prevent the stay-at-home mentality.

So is there anything theaters can do to combat this trend? Let us ask it this way – if prime-time first-run movies cost $3 or $4 a pop instead of $7 to $10, would attendance increase? I for one can say that my attendance sure would. I think theaters need to start trying to create a “Netflix” type business model – a flat fee for a month of movie patronage – perhaps $19.99 for 4 movies a month (Or, perhaps 10 movie tickets over 6 months for $49.99). You go when you want, you see what you want, you just have to reserve the ticket online or by phone. The theaters will make more on people who only use 80% of their reserved tickets than they would have made with prices at $9 a pop for a single showing, which keeps people away.

The only other solution would be some form of Clockwork Orange-style behavior control to curtail rudeness in theaters… but alas I dream too much…

Misadventures in human behavior on the CTA

2005-06-07T10:03:00.000-07:00

You know, when you get on the train and it is comprised of cars from a different line, things are going to be weird. As I stepped on the Brown line and it bore the characteristic stripes of the Purple, I kept my eyes peeled for some strangeness. I didn't have to peel very much at all.

His grotesque, overweight body sprawled across an entire bench seat, a sweaty white male was eating some sort of fast food. The air conditioning was emitting only the weakest of air blasts on this sunny, 85-degree morning. This was defnitely a good sign for the commute to come.

Smeared across his face (I am not making this up) were copious gobs of mayonnaise. Whatever it was he was eating (I could not bring myself to look too closely), he was smacking his lips quite approvingly with each bite and swallow (I assume he was chewing, again, I did not investigate too closely).

As I furiously dig for my iPod, I realize it is happily sitting on my nightstand - unable to offer any sound-isolating bliss amidst this already doomed commute.

Disgusting human beings are everywhere and, by and large, I am not particularly judgmental of them. One man's idea of disgust is another's idea of acceptable cultural variation. And this bit of relativism holds up quite nicely until people:
-Speak
-Expel some sort of bodily gas or odor
-Fall asleep while slumping against you

So this festering gob of humanity turns to the yuppie woman in the next bench (who is aggressively trying to ignore him, and was silently cursing her bad fortune for having sat there), and, while wiping his face with the one napkin he was provided (certainly not enough for the surface area present) says, in the whiny, unmodulated voice only used by the developmentally disabled (socially or otherwise):

"Do I have anything on my face?"

If people routinely crapped their pants in consternation, this woman would have had a nice load down there at this point. If the guy had said instead: “Excuse me miss, has one of my oozing pustules just burst upon you?” the reaction would have been quite similar.

So she is like “I’m Sorry?” Because of course, she had already attempted the iPod isolation technique. But obviously she heard (using the stock earphones), and as he motioned to his mayonnaise-encrusted mug, the best she could stammer was “Um, it looks like you missed a little.”

This is the sort of social interaction that, upon witnessing, makes you start to wonder. If this guy goes apeshit, could I take him down? Could I get out of the car? Is the Red Line going to be waiting at Belmont, could I make my escape there?

As we stood momentarily for a security check, this guy starts singing: “I hate the Chicago Police; You Hate the Chicago Police; We all hate the Chicago Police; Fuck the Chicago Police.”

I tried to bury myself in my book. This is most commuters’ alternate, if less successful strategy, for dealing with lunatics, vagrants, people with offensive body odor, drunkards, and the like.

He went on happily chattering, to no one in particular. Some of the comments sounded pretty heated – I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them were directed at me. Oddly enough, people with these social maladies seem, despite their lack of empathy for those around them, to know when others are trying their best to ignore them.

As the Belmont stop approached, I got up and camped by the door, awaiting my chance to escape. Then I hear behind me: “Yay, Red Line!” and I’m like “Shit – how to back up and sit down again without being noticed and spewed upon?”

Luckily, he went to the other door in the car, so my awkward retreat back into the boweld of the Brown Line went unnoticed. In fact, because whatever god exists has a perverse sense of humor, the A/C started blasting as soon as mayo-man made his exit. So all was good.

This story has no moral. Or punch line, really. But isn’t that very much like life? And like life, the question falls solely upon the liver of it, without narration or commentary from an omniscient author: What should we draw from a given situation?

Did this man have a mental illness? If he did, it wasn’t in the stage where police get out their night sticks. He wasn’t as threatening as say, the guy who coughs spasmodically without covering his mouth, his insides rumbling and rattling with something that must be akin to Tuberculosis. But then, he wasn’t as innocuous as the fat, unbathed black lady who tittered to herself with glee and muttered commentary as I made eyes with the pretty girl across the aisle. He certainly was in a realm of grossness with the gob of mystery goo you’ll come upon on every tenth train window. What is it? Is it a human secretion? Hair product gone awry?

The scary thought is that perhaps, he had no illness whatsoever. Maybe these behaviors are symptoms of a larger disorder, a systemic one. Maybe there are just more of these people cropping up in our socially alienated, pre-packaged society. As more people shut off their ears and eyes, trying their hardest to ignore everyone and thing around them, could these people, born with a higher sensitivity to such things, be crying out, waving their mayonnaisey hands in a desperate attempt to grasp at something, anything, which is real?

I don’t know. But I hope they wipe their fingers off before they do.

More Republican Thought Police Bullshit

2005-05-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

Congressman Spencer Bachus, a Banana Republican from Alabama (known nationwide as a hotbed of current political and intellectual thought) takes serious issue with Bill Maher's offhand joke about the Army's failure to meet recruitment goals, calling it "bordering on treason."

Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., takes issue with remarks on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, first aired May 13, in which Maher points out the Army missed its recruiting goal by 42 percent in April.

"More people joined the Michael Jackson fan club," Maher said. "We've done picked all the low-lying Lynndie England fruit, and now we need warm bodies."

Army Reserve Pfc. England was accused of abusing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"I think it borders on treason," Bachus said. "In treason, one definition is to undermine the effort or national security of our country."

Now, my first thought, of course, is: Do Congressmen get free HBO, too? Doesn't this ass-hat have anything better to do than to watch HBO reruns looking for offensive material? (Or, perhaps, was he actually hoping to catch something, like an airing of Real Sex to wank his tiny Republican peener to?) Isn't it past your bedtime, Mr. Bachus? Programming for sensitive souls such as yourself is usually on after school at around 3 or 4.

I especially like how Bachus offers his idea of word definitions. It's kind of like saying "In hot gay sex, one definition is to stay at home watching Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." Or, like saying, "In war, one definition is to randomly enter into hostilities against countries who have only the most tenuous connection to actual threats against our own country, and to ignore any and all of the rules of war that we see fit, based on the contingency of the moment."

I don't know about you, but my definition of Treason comes pretty close to the defition in Websters: actually taking steps to overthrow your government, or to kill an official of said government. Somehow, I don't think joking about Lynndie England or the Michael Jackson Fan Club quite qualifies.

This intellectual butt-plug's lack of understanding of our laws, our language, and our nation's history would be astonishing in any other context, but frankly it's more than endemic of the know-nothing-ism prevalent among today's conservative elite.

"I don't want (Maher) prosecuted," Bachus said. "I want him off the air."

Here we see the true motive behind this imbecile's thinking: he'd like to censor people who don't agree with him.

I hope there's a special section of Republican Hell in which people like this are strapped in, Clockwork Orange style, and forced to watch Michael Moore documentaries all day, with commercial breaks featuring the new Paris Hilton commercial and clips of Howard Stern.

More Star Wars Thoughts

2005-05-25T10:39:00.000-07:00

I had a conversation last night which got me thinking about Star Wars and George Lucas. My review below, I think, is a pretty fair reaction to the latest movie. While of course it's impossible to be completely objective about a movie whose predecessors were a big part of many viewers' formative years, people need to take a step back from the currently vogue "he raped my childhood" attitude and reflect.

So one question to ponder is: what, if any, obligations does Lucas have to his fan base?

On the one hand, Lucas' fans have made him fabulously wealthy, packing theaters repeatedly, and purchasing a plethora of one-more-trip-to-the-well video releases and toy-store gewgaws. So he certainly owes them some gratitude for his material comfort. In this case, one would think he'd be a little more responsive to the more than ample criticism heaped upon his films - starting with Jedi, for being too kid-oriented and repetitive. But instead of responding to this criticism by making a more mature movie with better writing, he made Phantom Menace, which is both kid-oriented and insipid, not to mention boring and loaded with toilet humor. This film was also lambasted (justifiably so) for its moribund pacing and awful dialogue. What did he do? With Clones, it appears he got the memo about lack of action, but skipped the one about awful dialogue. Sith also suffers from this affliction.

On the other hand, Lucas has the right to make whatever movies he feels like. People don't have to pay to see them, and if they are awful (As Menace was all the time and Clones was some of the time), people can just not go, not buy the DVDs, etc.

So why do people feel so betrayed by the subpar prequel series? Shouldn't they just move on to greener pastures like Lord of the Rings?

Lucas is trapped by the terrific success of A New Hope and Empire. Those films, apparently by chance (given subsequent efforts), so captured the zeitgeist and the public imagination, that they inspired a torrent of devotion, money-spending, and fervor. After Empire, the viewing public essentially surrendered, saying "just please show us the next part of the story." The reason people feel so betrayed is that, now that they have surrendered to Lucas as a storyteller, he has begun to suck at telling it, and to take it for granted that he is a genius. It's kind of like signing Jason Giambi to a $150 million contract, only to have him start stinking it up 3 seasons in because he doesn't want to listen to his batting coaches any more.

George Lucas is a human being, and human beings have egos. Any of us, given the right amount of success and accolades, would start to "believe our own press" as it were. Lucas in 1974 had something to prove and no one who would believe in him. Lucas in 1994 was being begged by throngs of fans to please favor them with another slice of his genius.

If we can fault him for anything, it is for not being one of the aloof, detatched Buddhist Jedi from his movies who are immune to inflated egos and reckless hubris. But then, we can't really fault him for not living up to our expectations as an artist. Artists tend to create for ther own motives - it just so happened that Lucas' motive has changed over time, as any person who suddenly became a revered bazillionaire might.

So we just need to heave a sigh, chalk it up to human nature, and try to block out our memories of the prequels while we pop the "good ones" into our DVD players. Lucas can't edit our imaginations, or give our memories a Special Edition of suck. We can thank him for his initial burst of creativity, and cluck our tongues at his very human fall from grace. And he can laugh his way directly to the bank.

Movie Review: Star Wars Episode 3

2005-05-24T11:03:00.000-07:00

Star Wars Episode 3 - Revenge of the Sith.

The Short Review: Better than Episodes 1 and 2, not as good as Jedi. 2 ½ out of 4 stars. Maybe a 7 out of 10 if I’m in a Star Wars mood, more like a 6 if I’ve just watched a more capable action adventure like Lord of the Rings.

The Long Review: Well, the results are in, and George Lucas has indeed forgotten everything he ever knew about writing.

Sith has certain elements of greatness within it, trying their hardest to peek out, but they are inevitably stifled by inutterably ham-fisted dialogue and nagging logical holes in plot.

A Recap (Quite Spoiler Laden!):

Obi Wan and Anakin open the film by leading a rescue attempt of Chancellor Palpatine, who has been kidnapped by the evil Separatist Leader Count Dooku and his weirdo flunky, General Grievous. (Plot Hole #1: If the Jedi are so distrustful of Palpatine’s power grabs, why are they so bent on rescuing him? Plot Hole#2: Who are the Separatists? Why are they separating, and from whom? If they are separating, why are they attacking the central system of the Republic?)

Upon reaching the captive chancellor, the Jedi boys fight Count Dooku, leading to a mano-a-mano duel between Anakin and Dooku, while Obi Wan lays unconscious. Anakin cuts off Dooku’s hands (seriously, this is getting old, George) and then beheads Dooku at the urging of Chancellor Palpatine. In the confusion, General Grievous escapes to live another day.

Upon their return to the capital, Anakin reunites with Padme, his secret wife. (Plot Hole #3: Lucas seems to go out of his way to establish that Jedi in general and Anakin in particular achieve some measure of fame through their deeds. Yet, why can he simply hang back froma big crowd of reporters and nuzzle his secret wife, who also happens to be a famous Senatorial leader herself?) He learns that she is pregnant, which leaves him quite ambivalent. (Plot Hole #4: With the level of technology established in the series, how can they not know that she is carrying twins?) He begins to dream about her death during childbirth, much to his torment. Anakin would do anything to prevent this fate from befalling her.

Relations between the Jedi and the Chancellor strain almost to the breaking point (See Plot Hole #1), with Anakin caught between. Palpatine wants Anakin to be his personal representative on the Jedi Council, while the Jedi would like Anakin to keep an eye on his erstwhile mentor. Palpatine uses this rift to begin sowing the seeds of doubt within Anakin about the Jedis' moral compass and the nature of the Force itself. Palpatine accuses the Jedi of conspiring to overthrow his rule, while various Jedi express their misgivings about Palpatine’s continued use of emergency powers well beyond his original term of office.

Obi Wan is dispatched to the planet Utapau to knock General Grievous out of commission, while Yoda heads to Kashyyk, the Wookie homeworld, to fight separatist forces there (Plot Hole #5: Why are we going to Wookie World again? This was pointless, if reasonably fun to watch). Obi Wan does indeed eventually succeed in destroying Grievous, thus dealing a death blow to the Separatist movement (Plot Hole #6: if this is such a huge secessionist faction causing wars on countless planets, why does the death of one or two leaders spell the movement’s doom?).

During his conversations with Palpatine, Anakin learns that the Chancellor is in fact a Sith Lord, with a deep knowledge of both the good and Dark Sides of the Force. He is alternately horrified and intrigued, since Palpatine promises him the power to stop the death of his loved ones. But, ever the good Jedi, he reveals his discovery to Jedi Council Leader Mace Windu, who thereupon leads a Jedi party to arrest Palpatine. Palpatine gets his Dark Side on, killing Windu’s companions and fighting Windu to a standoff using his force lightning.

Which leads to a confrontation in which Anakin must choose – allow Windu to kill Palpatine, or save the Chancellor in the hopes of learning his secret powers (Plot Hole #7: I thought the last two movies, and the scene in which Anakin beheads Dooku, have established that the Jedi do not kill unless necessary, and never execute unarmed prisoners? Yet here we have Windu, a respected and supposedly ethical Jedi leader, doing just that). Anakin chooses to defend Palpatine, leading to Windu’s death and Anakin’s conscription by Palpatine as a new Lord of the Sith, renamed Darth Vader. Palpatine commands Vader to help him destroy the Jedi, as they have proven to be usurpers against the Republic. Vader readily complies (a little too readily, in my opinion, for dramatic coherence). Palpatine orders the clone army to turn against their Jedi commanders, which they readily do as well. Vader is also dispatched to the lava planet Mustafar to kill the remaining Separatist leaders – with Obi Wan and Padme following close behind.

Obi Wan and Anakin have some serious words on Mustafar, Anakin believing that Obi Wan has turned his wife against him, which leads to their penultimate light saber battle, Anakin’s further disfigurement, and his being left to die by Obi Wan on the lava plains of the planet. Concurrently, Yoda duels Palpatine to an apparent standoff in the Senate chambers – after which, for whatever reason, he declares that “Into exile, I must go.”

Obi Wan whisks Padme off to the hospital to give birth to twins (See Plot Hole #4), but is saddened by her “lack of will to live” through childbirth, and her death (Plot Hole #8: In Jedi, Princess Leia remarks that she remembers her mother vaguely, as “very beautiful, and very sad.” Must be one of those regressed fetal-womb memories or something). Meanwhile, Anakin is transformed bodily into the Darth Vader we know and love from the original trilogy, and is informed by Palpatine that he in fact had killed Padme accidentally in his rage on Mustafar. Vader becomes Palpatine’s right hand man in the formation of the First Galactic Empire, and overseeing the construction of the Death Star (Plot Hole #9: It takes 20 years to build the first Death Star? It only took like 3 or 4 to build the second one, which was much, much larger. How did they keep a 20 year project like that secret until Episode 4?).

The twins are sent to separate destinations – Leia to Alderaan, finally pictured in this movie, to be raised by the influential (and apparently royal?) Organa family. Luke, on the other hand, is sent to the Lars homestead on Tatooine (Hugely Gaping Plot Hole #10: So let’s see. We want to hide these kids from their evil father and emperor so as to avoid their corruption. Where to? How About Darth Vader’s Old Neighborhood? Surely neither he nor the Emperor will think to look there, with the family that Anakin’s mommy married into.). Cue double sunset, swelling John Williams music, end credits, finis.

Whew. This is a long movie, and there is a lot of plot. Which is good, since Episodes 1 and 2 were so threadbare. The pacing is much snappier and there are many more “events” in this film than the previous two (one gets the impression that they could have been condensed into one movie – which may have been much more interesting, allowing a third episode to chronicle the formation of the Empire, perhaps). Lucas is not the most awful “plotter” in the world. But after watching this movie, one wishes he would just hand off an outline to some real writers, editors and directors, a la The Empire Strikes Back - because logical flaws, weak characterization, and groan-worthy dialogue crimp the drama in many if not most of the key scenes in the movie.

First, let’s look at what works.

From an acting standpoint, Obi Wan (Ewan MacGregor) and Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) are somewhat less wooden this time around. In early scenes, their camaraderie is actually fun to watch and lends some gravitas to later scenes of betrayal.

The plot as such does a nice job of showing Anakin as someone who desperately wants to find principles to cling to – even though he ends up backing the wrong side in the end, he did it because he wanted to maintain some kind of principles in his life. This gave a good depth to his characterization that his “romance” with Padme failed to bring. Anakin’s wrestling with ethics throughout the course of the movie is done relatively well, and lends an air of tragedy to the proceedings – I found myself hoping he would make different choices, even as I knew how things would eventually turn out.

Let it be said that some of the Anakin/Padme scenes actually work, too, and serve the purpose of drama and story – when they argue about events, and Padme admonishes him to be open and honest with her, they actually almost sounded like a human couple for a few moments.

As Palpatine seduces Anakin towards the Dark Side, he offers a few precious nuggets of Sith lore – what most fans have been yearning for, as opposed to the C-SPAN in Space they’ve been getting. The scene in which Anakin accuses Palpatine of being a Sith Lord and draws his light saber against him is one of the few truly dramatic scenes in the film.

The betrayal of the Jedi by the army, while not as good as it could have been, works pretty well. The montage of scenes is cool visually, and along with the music conveys a nice sense of mood. A little more explanation as to the mechanics of “Order 66” might be nice – are the clone troopers programmed to obey the Emperor, or are they just generally automotons?

Anakin and Obi Wan’s duel also works, owing to the reversal of the camaraderie they previously displayed. Thankfully, the dialogue ditches Lucas’ “using contractions is something that I can not do” convention and becomes more natural, with Christensen growling his lines at MacGregor with genuine emotion.

Now, the things that don’t work. (Sigh.)

As far as acting goes, Padme (Natalie Portman) and Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) don’t fare as well as MacGregor and Christensen – they look like their eyes are on the clock in the bluscreen stage – when can we get this over with? Palpatine (Ian McDarmid) is an enigma – his low-key dialogue scenes actually work – but when he is asked to emote, everything seems horribly off-kilter. I most sincerely did not want the Emperor to be a whiny bitch who whimpers that Mace Windu is about to kill him. Yikes.

Anakin’s beheading of Count Dooku (in the first 20 minutes of the movie, no less) is so quick and arbitrary as to be almost pointless. In addition to continuing Lucas’ nasty habit of eliminating potentially interesting characters way too quickly (Darth Maul, Boba Fett, Obi Wan Kenobi in Ep. 4), it sorely undercuts the characterization later built of Anakin as someone who wrestles with his ethics. Is he already this in thrall to Palpatine? If so, why? Why does he question he actions of the Jedi so deeply, but not question Palpatine’s order to kill an unarmed (literally) man?

Which leads us to General Grievous, who is aptly named, as his character does grievous damage to the credibility of the movie. Why is this video game level boss a better dramatic foil than a fine human actor like Christopher Lee (Count Dooku)? Palpatine’s betrayal of Dooku (evidenced for 2 seconds in a horrified look between them) would have been much more interesting had it happened later in the film and after more seduction of Anakin. Grievous looks phony and vaguely ridiculous, bereft of drama or any ability to be imposing as he crawls like a bug and twirls lightsabers like helicopter blades. He sounds even worse, trying to cough up a furball in all of his scenes. What’s worse, we get no insight as to his motive or origin. Why is he encased in this suit? What sort of creature was he? Why should any of us care?

The aforementioned plot holes and logical consistency errors hamper the drama of the plot. When you are built up to a confrontation between principals, such as the fight between Windu and Palpatine, it is quite jarring to be jerked away from the action by “things that make you go HMMM?” Many large scale action sequences end up being pointless tech demos because they happen for reasons we know not what and between factions we care not a whit about.

The effects, while mostly superb, fail in a few key areas. First of all, many scenes still have a “bluescreen” feel to them – many characters just do not seem to be in the rooms they are supposed to be inhabiting. I would guess computers and/or artists just aren’t advanced enough yet to depict all the subtleties of direction lighting, difraction, and reflection which play upon a person in a real setting. On a related note – attempts to graft real actor Temeura Morrison’s head upon CGI clone trooper bodies are not successful in the least. His head just floats there, too big for the armor it is encased in. Second, certain character designs (particularly Gen. Grievous) are less awe-inspiring than guffaw-inspiring. Thirdly, certain scenes just suffer from overload. Okay, George, we’re impressed by how many buildings and whizzing hover cars there are on Coruscant. Now get over it and hire a screenwriter!

Another "effect" which is overused are fast-moving lightsabers. I found myself longing for the more static fights of the original trilogy - boring as they might be visually, because the bevy of flips and twirls present in the current fights are so dizzying as to make them hard to follow dramatically. You don't "see" Obi Wan cut off Anakin's legs, you just realize that he did because whoops, there they go. A little more pacing would have benefited the action greatly (examples include the Luke-Vader duel in Jedi, and the Anakin-Dooku duel in Clones).

The worst offender in the film, though, is its dialogue. Some of it falls intot he “Show, don’t tell” category – Darth Vader’s comically stupid scream upon learning of Padme’s death, for instance. We know he’s upset, because nearby objects are being crushed by his force-enhanced anguish. Why add the scream? Near the end, a robot tells Obi Wan that Padme has “apparently lost the will to live.” Good god. While this line should not be uttered at all, it is even worse to have a faux-emoting robot deliver it. A veritable plethora or expositional clunkers similarly bog down this script. Worse than crappy expositional dialogue, however, is off character dialogue – words that should not be uttered in the sequence they are if an audience’s belief in the characters is to be preserved. Palpatine’s simpering during his action scenes falls into this category, as well as Yoda’s truly awful “fightin’ words.” “Not if anything about it I have to say.” Yes, Yoda, we wish you’d just shut the hell up. When Obi Wan yelps “I just can’t keep watching!” as he views security footage of Anakin killing Jedi, one is tempted to yell “Neither Can WE!!!” up at the screen. Every instance of the word "younglings" in the script when "children" would have done the job is like a bad-writing icepick to the brain. Awful romantic dialogue ices the cake: “You are so beautiful.” “Only because I’m so in love with you.” “Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo.” BLEARGH. This sort of dialogue only further hampers scenes which were problematic to begin with because of poor logic or characterization.

As I look back, I notice that “What works” is about half the size of “What doesn’t work.” Yet I would still give this movie 2 and a half stars. Well, this is because the awful bits are outweighed in general by the not-awful. Until you are rudely ripped from the fantasy by an awful line or a terrible effect, the movie is enjoyable. So it’s kind of like Chinese Water torture combined with coitus interruptus. 10 minutes of pleasure, broken up by bursts of annoyance, and then an attempt to sink back into the enjoyable fantasy.

If this movie had come after the three-star Return of the Jedi (which was great for 90 minutes and just mildly dumb for the other 30), it would be lambasted as an utter failure. But since it followed the thoroughly execrable Episode 1 (1.5 stars in my book) and the improved but still constipated Episode 2 (an even 2 stars), it fares better by comparison.

I can’t help but wonder if this will cheapen the experience of the Original Trilogy. I also can’t help but think it will. While not Shakespeare or Citizen Kane by any means, the dialogue, acting and effects in those movies seamlessly meshed into a sum that was greater than its parts. The now-complete prequel trilogy, by comparison, can only honestly be viewed as a littered scrap pile of parts which never achieved anything close to a cohesive whole. And since there is only one man responsible for making the parts of a movie gel into a whole, Director George Lucas’ destiny is inescapable – he will be remembered as someone who squandered the incredible promise of his prodigious creative spark by reaching for too much, relying on too few for help, and brooking no criticism of his first draft of anything. And that, my friends, is a tragedy greater than any suffered by one of his characters. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a “dramatic” scream to engage in: “NOOOOOO!!!!”

Wrigley Field part deux

2005-05-23T12:42:00.000-07:00

After having gone to Wrigley this Sunday to see the Mighty White Sox battle the Hapless Cubs, I have some additional thoughts to offer.

This is not a mea culpa: I still think Wrigley is a hell-hole, with at least 50% awful seats and many other terrible characteristics. It is not designed to contain the number of people who cram into it to drink beer and glance passingly at a baseball game. As I sat in the last row of the 100 level, an endless stream of people and vendors bumped into my head and back. The neighborhood is crammed full of derivative, overpriced bars, packed to the gills with simpering boobs bent on acting out their fantasies of Girls Gone Wild videos.

But, on the other hand, I didn't have all that bad a time Sunday. The weather was nice (just about the first time this season), the crowd was somewhat subdued (they have become more so since the advent of interleague play), and I didn't need to go to the bathroom all day, so all in all it was not a bad experience.

One incident in the game brought Sox and Cubs fandom into stark contrast: With Cubs 1B Derek Lee on first, OF Jeromy Burnitz stroked a double down the line. As Lee was rounding second, Sox SS Juan Uribe motioned and told Lee the ball was foul. Lee, ever the retard, stopped in his tracks, as if to go back to first. Then, realizing his idiocy, he actually checked for himself and saw Uribe was pulling his leg. He made it to third, but did not score as he no doubt would have running full steam. The Sox escaped the inning on the next AB without a run scored.

After the game, Cubs manager Dusty Baker and counteless simpering Cubs fans decried this as unsportsmanlike play. Which really brings to light the difference between the teams: Had it happened to a Sox player, Sox fans would be decrying the baserunners' stupidity and no one else. Sox fans know an idiot when they see one, having seen so many. Cubs fans and players, by comparison, whine and bleat like stuck little billy goats, searching the cosmos in vain for someone to blame for their misfortune.

Idiots.

You rule, Juan Uribe! Way to play the mind game.

United States: Episode III - Revenge of the Fascists

2005-05-17T10:59:00.000-07:00

Newsweek is the latest news outlet who has been essentially forced by the Government to "retract" a story, which details well-known and widely reported prisoner abuses at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba. In addition to smearing detainees' faces with fake menstrual blood, investigators are reported to be flushing their Korans down the toilets of their cells as an interrogation tactic.

Now, personally, I could care less if they did this. I mean, the blood is a little much, but who says prisoners of "war" should be allowed to keep whatever books they want in their cells? And frankly, I don't think any of these abuses even rises to the level of violating the Geneva Accords on the Treatment of Prisoners, which don't even apply here, because there is no declared "war" anyway (except on civil liberties...).

What irritates the piss out of me is that this administration is so bent on information control that they've essentially neutered our once strong independent press into a Pravda-esque P.R. vehicle. Is it any wonder that Americans who actually want objective news have to go to BBC and other foreign news outlets?

I am disgusted with the state of our nation, and the blind, lemming-like faith that the public seems to have with these Fascistic Banana-Republicans whose heads are so swelled with power that they can't read the fine print in the constitution they've sworn to protect and defend.

Fun time-wasters for those long fridays at work

2005-04-15T09:41:00.000-07:00

The "Same Game" - a diabolically simple and addictive puzzle game - perfect for work, since it is a tiny file which uses no system resources, and there is no time limit, so it's easy to minimize and come back to:

http://www.winsite.com/bin/Info?500000030590

Ballparks old and new, some decent pics:

http://www.ballparksofbaseball.com/

See your favorite team's unies through their entire existence:

http://www.baseballhalloffame.org/exhibits/online_exhibits/dressed_to_the_nines/database.htm

Reviews of everything from CD's, DVD's to Video Games:

http://www.metacritic.com/

Geeky Star Wars dorks can find trailers and such here:

http://movies.channel.aol.com/feature/starwars/

Non-baseball related topics? Pshaw!!

2005-04-14T10:06:00.000-07:00

Someone mentioned that most if not all of my postst thus far to this blog have been baseball-oriented. To which I say, so?

Honestly, some other topics are coming. I have yet to go to a park this year besides the 4 featured. (Truth be told, I haven't gone to the Urinal this season yet - I'm trying to put it off until May 20-22...) So those posts will be few and far between for a while.

I will be starting up a re-read of my Western Philosophy textbook soon, so I'm sure I'll have some inspiration for non-baseball topics soon..

In the meantime, how about those White Sox? 6-2, best record in the majors, baby!

What's encouraging is generally, they're hitting like crap but still finding ways to squeak out games. The pitching has been mostly terrific. Once they start hitting, they should be a juggernaut...

No school like the old school.

2005-04-08T16:18:00.000-07:00

I just bought a Sony PSP. Yes, I'm a dork.

It looks really neat, and the games thus far have been pretty cool. I've got Lumines and Ridge Racer. They're nearly PS2 quality, though not quite. Still, very neat to have in a hand-held.

But it got me thinking - what games would I like to see ported over to the new system?

Wah lah, here they are:

Rez. From the creator of Lumines, Tetsuya Mizugichi. Like Tron on acid, with trippy trance music that changes with your gameplay. A total mind-job. I'd love to zone out on the train playing this (and grooving to the beats).

Speaking of beats, Frequency would be an amazing chill-out game to take with you on a plane.

ICO would be an incredible game to have with you. I don't know how well it would translate away from the big screen, but damn, I just want more ICO. One of my two or three favorite games of the past 5 years.

Gradius V would be an incredible and addictive time waster on a handheld. They just don't make space shooters like this any more. Oh, wait, this came out last year. Well, OK. Treasure still makes them like this. Those wonderful Japanese saints...

Oh, I can't forget Katamari Damacy. The story of a cosmic prince and his junky balls... the graphics would not tax the PSP hardware, and the thought of humming along to the theme song (lyrics: nuh nah.. nah nah nah nah nah nuh.......) makes me happy.

Gaming Dorks of the world, unite!

Money matters

2005-04-08T16:12:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to the "Team Marketing Report", which calculates the "Fan Cost Index" for major league teams in every sport. The upshot - The Cubs cost the 2nd most in MLB to go to a game, while the White Sox cost the 6th.

To which I say - outrageous! Are we (the Sox) the 6th best team in the majors? Do we have the 6th highest attendance?

No, I say. This is ridiculous. Something needs to be done. Jerry Reinsdork and his marketing goons have priced Sox fans, who are generally a more working-class population to begin with, onto their living room couches.

And people gripe about attendance.

I have a simple cure: $5 upper deck tickets, Monday through Thursday. You publicize it, build some goodwill, and put fannies in seats that otherwise would have gone empty.

Brooks Boyer, are you reading this? Probably not.