Russellings

06:11 pm - Molly's Most Important Message

I was a great fan of Molly Ivins, the political essayist from Texas whose favorite sport was puncturing self-important balloons with her lacerating, acerbic humor. She was well informed, insightful, articulate, really funny, and relentlessly, devotedly humanitarian.

She wrote 11 books and countless newspaper columns. Her total output easily ran into the millions of words, ranging from the outrageously witty to the trenchant to the heart-breaking. None were more important than those that appeared in her 1999 column in which she announced that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She figuratively stared her readers straight in the eye and wrote

Get. The. Damn. Mammogram. NOW!

Molly Ivins (1944-2007), RIP

03:30 pm - Afghanistan: The Mossad Model

Dear Ed Schultz:

Anyone who can casually toss off the name Zeke Bratkowski is (like me) old enuf to remember Adolf Eichmann.

He was the "transportation coordinator" for the Nazi extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, and Majdanek. He commenced his work in mid-1942 and was largely done with it by early 1945. During that 1000-day period, it is estimated that he authorized and facilitated the deaths of 2,700,000 people, mainly Jews. To put that in perspective, Eichmann was responsible for the deaths of 2,700 people PER DAY for A THOUSAND DAYS. Compare that to 3,000 people dead on one day ONLY (9/11) due to Osama bin Laden.

After WW2, Eichmann fled Germany under an alias and settled in Argentina. Israel was founded in 1948 and created an intelligence service known as the Mossad. Using standard spy techniques, their undercover operatives tracked Eichmann down, kidnapped him, and smuggled him out of the country in 1960 — 15 years after the war was over. They put him on trial in Israel, produced witnesses against him, gave him counsel and a chance to defend himself, found him guilty, and hanged him in 1962.

Despite Eichmann arguably being 1000 times worse than bin Laden, Israel used narrowly targeted espionage tactics and the judicial system. It did not feel compelled to use a military "solution" to bring him to justice by bombing Argentina, spending a trillion dollars, making a million people homeless, sacrificing thousands of its own citizens and tens of thousands of innocent bystanders — and, not so incidentally, creating a whole new generation of outraged, vindictive Eichmann wannabes.

No, that level of obscenely violent over-reaction is something we'd only expect of, say, Osama bin Laden or Adolf Eichmann.

Some role models, huh, Ed?

= = = = = =

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

11:04 am - In Praise of 24-Hour Time

Peter Mackie writes (http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/mailbag/article_8d9531f2-26b5-5ef0-8241-eda2725bf41f.html) to complain about Eastgate Cinemas’ time listing for their midnight showing of Paranormal Activity. It had been listed for Friday at 12:01 AM, which he and many other people interpreted to mean a minute after Thursday had expired. Instead, it turned out to mean a minute into Saturday.

I have long bemoaned the stubborn arrogance of the United States when it comes to our failure to adopt the metric system (yes, we are the LAST NATION ON EARTH without it), our monolingualism, the absence of digits on our coins, and many other flip-offs to the rest of the world. Besides being rude, these parochialisms are economically stupid, discouraging tourism and making our non-metric goods harder to sell abroad.

Eastgate’s scheduling snafu represents yet another example of this, for which the country as a whole is mainly responsible. Civilians use 12-hour clocks in this country, which means that telling someone to take a pill “at 9:00” may result in double dosages. The military, hospitals, air-traffic controllers, meteorologists, certainly astronomers — anyone who needs to know the time precisely — all use a 24-hour clock.

24-hour time eliminates the ambiguity of what exactly you mean by “9:00”. You also no longer have to wonder whether “12:00 PM” means noon or midnight. (Technically, since the Latin “post meridiem” means “AFTER midday”, “12:00 PM” could only be midnight, and noon would be “12:00 M” — midday exactly — but try to convince anyone of that.) It also eliminates the ambiguity about each day having 2 midnights: The one that starts the day is 0:00, while the one that ends the day is 24:00. Furthermore, it provides a convenient method for scheduling things that happen AFTER midnight, that you’re staying up late for: Just keep the clock running past 24. That way, Eastgate could have said the movie started at 0:01 on Saturday OR at 24:01 on Friday; either way, it would be clearer than what they were forced to do because of our stupid adherence to the outdated 12-hour clock.

04:50 pm - Medicare for All: How To Get There

Clearly, a national single-payer health-care plan is best for the country. Equally clearly, the best model for such a plan is Medicare. Indeed, many advocates of single-payer refer to it by the shorthand term "Medicare for all". One of the few legitimate objections to spreading the Medicare umbrella over everyone is that the rapid shock of it would cause massive dislocation in the insurance industry, affecting not only the corporations, their stockholders, and their poor, poor CEOs but also thousands of their employees. So here's how to get the job done without the shock: Phase it in. The current threshold age for Medicare eligibility is 65. Make it 60 in 2011, 55 in 2012, 50 in 2013, and so on. After 13 years, it'll kick in at birth. That'll give everyone a chance to get used to it and provide lots of opportunities for working out the kinks. Simple. Fair. Good for the grandkids as well as grandma. And doesn't require 1000 pages to explain. 

11:52 am - The Real Terrorists

Ever hear of the “availability heuristic”? That’s the term scholars and risk managers use to refer to your ability to call up a memory or image of any particular hazard. Think of an airplane crash. Now think of a car crash. Which one produced an immediate, recognizable picture in your brain, perhaps associated with a specific date, time, location, and name?

If you’re like most people, it’s the airplane crash that’s most readily available to your recollection. Such disasters are big and spectacular. They’re also quite rare, which in a perverse way makes them news and thus more likely to get media coverage than car crashes.

So most people, when asked which mode of transportation is most dangerous, will quickly be able to recall airplane disasters and will bubble air travel up to the top of their worry list. Justified? Hmph. Here are the US fatality data for a typical year:

 • motor vehicles: 45,000

 • motorcycles: 3,700

 • bicycles: 750

 • airplanes: 140

Many, many small events, almost unnoticeable individually, often add up to outweigh something big and spectacular but really rare. Mice and termites — many, many of them nibbling away in tiny little bites, but never quitting — do more damage than floods or earthquakes. King Gillette lowballed his razors and made money selling the blades. Apple gives away iTunes and makes billions at 99¢ per song. The best thing you can do for your car is blow $4 on a quart of oil every 3,000 miles.

So consider these fatality counts (IE, dead Americans), in which RFA = religious fanatic attacks and LoHC = lack of health coverage:

 • 2000: RFA, 0; LoHC, 17,000

 • 2001: RFA, 3,000; LoHC, 17,000

 • 2002: RFA, 0; LoHC, 17,000

 • 2003: RFA, 0; LoHC, 17,000

 • 2004: RFA, 0; LoHC, 17,000

 • 2005: RFA, 0; LoHC, 17,000

 • 2006: RFA, 0; LoHC, 17,000

 • 2007: RFA, 0; LoHC, 17,000

 • 2008: RFA, 0; LoHC, 17,000

Religious-fanatic attacks are perpetrated by ideological zealots.

National health care is opposed by ideological zealots.

Terrorists, by definition, are those who seek to affect your behavior by terrifying you. They are not at all hesitant about using lies, threats, and violence to do so.

08:56 am - Benefits of Socialism

2009 Aug. 31

Letters to the Editor
The Capital Times

tctvoice@madison.com

Brendan Connelly writes (http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/letters/463933) that he’s working his “butt off every day to provide … the essentials of life [for himself and his 4 kids] as I realize that health care is not a right of birth”. He wants to “obliterate the silly notion of socialized health care”.

Brendan, I don’t have any kids of my own, but I gladly pay taxes so that yours can have the benefit of socialized schools, libraries, clean water, reliable sewerage, streets and sidewalks, police and fire protection, garbage and snow removal, and so on. What happens to your kids, Brendan, if you’re hurt on the job and can’t work any more? What if you succumb to a heart attack because you’ve been working your butt off? Suppose you contract hepatitis; can you come up with 80 grand a year for dialysis, or will your kids have to watch you turn yellow and die?

Well, for the most part, nothing will happen to your kids, because we, your nabors, will still be taking care of them. Except for one thing: their health. Don’t you think it’s kind of odd that their health matters more to me than it does to you — that I’M still willing to look out for them, even if you can’t?

That’s all that socialism is, Brendan, nabors looking out for each other in an organized, efficient manner. Sure, health care wasn’t a “right of birth” for Thomas Jefferson’s kids, but neither were schools or sanitation; the reason that they’re universally available today is because citizens like you and me insisted that our government MAKE them rights, so our kids would have a better world to live in than we did.

The technical term for this is “progress”. The technical term for the result is “civilization”.

Oh, and that dialysis? The government socialized it. It’s rationed. But not the way you may be thinking. It’s rationed upwards, so that EVERYBODY can get it. Thanks, nabors!

01:18 pm - Oath or Affirmation

The following letter to the editor appeared in today’s edition of The Capital Times of Madison (http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/letters/461802):

= = = = = =

I'm an atheist, which, according to various polls, is the least trusted of any minority group. Less trusted than racial minorities, less trusted than gays.

Before giving testimony in a court of law, one is required to put his or her hand on a Bible and swear to tell the truth "so help me God." An atheist in that situation is faced with two very bad choices. One could lie by saying "yes," affirming belief in a god, even though the person deems him to be as fictional as Daffy Duck while having one hand upon a book he or she consider a fairy tale.

The other option is to be true to the oath of honesty by saying, "No, I cannot swear to any god, as I do not believe." In that case, the court will simply use a secular oath that threatens the person with penalties of perjury in place of God's wrath and risk of eternal damnation.

Atheists are forced to either lie -- which breaks their oath to tell the truth before they even start to testify -- or they out themselves before a jury that deems atheists to be the least trustworthy minority group there is. Ironically, being fully honest and refusing to swear to a god I don't believe in will most likely influence jurors to give my testimony less credibility, since, as polls show, atheists are considered the least trusted minority.

Just imagine the outrage that would exist if before testifying, people were asked about their sexual orientation.

Karl Schubert

Wauwatosa

= = = = = =

Here’s my follow-up letter:

= = = = = =

Karl Schubert's letter of Aug. 13 complains that atheists who wish to testify in court face the dilemma of having to swear "so help me God" (whom they don't believe in, making it a lie right off the bat) or refusing to do so (thereby opening themselves up to contempt of court charges or, if allowed to testify anyway, prejudicing the jury against them).

Unfortunately, this is the position that a lot of atheists are placed in due to the ignorance of court officials about a perfectly acceptable alternative, one which I've used myself. When it's your turn to be sworn in, quietly approach the judge and say "Your honor, I don't do oaths. May I affirm under penalty of perjury?". Since this option is mentioned 3 times in the US Constitution, you should be OK, tho the judge and clerk may have to consult a bit before they proceed.

The real question in my mind is why, in an era where people justifiably have more to fear from jail time for perjury than over burning in Hell, the default witness-sincerity test is still the oath rather than the affirmation.

= = = = = =

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:--"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." [Note absence of “so help me God”.]

11:01 am - Bridge to Terabithia on ABC Family Tonight

 The last theatrical film I saw via TV was Cabaret, about a quarter century ago. During the many frequent commercial interruptions, my friend Diane (who had already seen the movie in a real theater) would fill me in on all the material that had been hacked out to make it suitable for an audience that was apparently expecting pablum. It was a desecration, and I was so completely disgusted with their butchery that I swore off movies on TV. (I would occasionally make a tiny exception for a movie that was MADE for TV, since they could plan around the commercial breaks and tailor the pacing, language, violence level, etc. for the LCD standards of the medium.)

05:53 pm - Rating a Century of Wisconsin Senators

 Rating a Century of Wisconsin Senators

04:54 am - Horrifying Words

 The other day I reposted to several atheist listservs a message sent to me by a guy who said he's a life-long dedicated atheist but just doesn't understand all the fuss about homosexuality. His essay was entitled "Must Atheists Support Homosexuality?" and, to make a long story short, his answer was "no".

03:28 pm - Top-Rated SF&F Films over the Last Decade

 The other day I wrote that I only hand out a 9 to a film that's so well done that I expect it to stand out in a crowd as truly memorable from a decade's perspective. It occurred to me that I should put that to the test. Herewith the SF&F films that I've considered 9-worthy since 1998 — 29 (10 of them rereleases) out of the 626 I've covered. Judge for yourself:

11:52 pm - SF&F Movie Reviews Now Being E-Mailed

Pursuant to manufacturer's recommendations, I let the battery in my electric toothbrush run down twice a year — at Independence Day and Xmas.

I figure that's also a good time to send out semiannual notices of the availability of my e-mailed reviews of science fiction and fantasy films. I try to send them out the same day the movie opens in Madison. Subscribe by sending blank e-mail to:

08:15 pm - Trespassing Dragonballs

 SASS*: April is the cruelest month. Get all excited by trailers for X-Men (May 1), Star Trek (May 8), Terminator (May 21), Night at the Museum (May 22), and Ice Age (July 1), then this is the “feature”?

Rating scale: 9 (superlative) to 1 (execrable)

Short story: 9-7, recommended; 6-4, up to you; 3-1, eschew

Ratings intended for: adult SF&F fans

This Week’s SF&F Movies

Alien Trespass (PG, 1:24) — 5 — 3rd string, formula

(opened last week, left town already)

This is the quintessential “up to you” movie. While Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse tried to recreate the 1950s double-feature movie experience (complete with bad framing, scratched pictures, and missing reels), this 2009 release tries to recreate an actual 1950s alien-invasion movie. And it does a fine job of it, if that’s your cup of tea, right down to the chintzy crashed UFO and the monsters in rubber suits.

There’s a scientist, of course. There always is. This one has his body taken over by Urp, a marshal from outer space, who’s trying to track down the monstrous, tentacled, sometimes invisible, huge-eyed alien ghota before it can start reproducing. After a bit, even the astronomer’s dolled-up, perpetually hot-to-trot wife notices something amiss. Meanwhile, the local teens continue their running feud with the cops, who continue to doubt the odd things they claim to have seen. Many of the scenes take place in the local diner, whose PM-shift waitress becomes the unlikely heroine.

The best use of a scientist I’ve seen in such a film was the tongue-in-cheek Tremors, in which we get the standard scene of all the townspeople standing around speculating where the giant worms might have come from. Space aliens? Radioactive mutants? Evolution run amuck? They all turn to look at the scientist, who says “How should I know? I’m a geologist!”. And that’s that!

The only bit in Alien Trespass that comes close to this is when the young hot-rodder wants to go scope out the new cars and his friends try to persuade him to go alien-hunting instead. “Edsels will be around forever”, they reassure him. Of course, that line might very well have occurred in an actual 1957 film.

Aside from that 1 bit, they play it absolutely straight. And, if I were reviewing it straight as well, it would share a 2 with this week’s other miscarriage. But I admit to a certain nostalgia for this kind of thing, so it ends up smack in the middle.

Dragonball Evolution (PG, 1:25) — 2 — 2nd string, crossover

I guess this was based on some manga epic that got turned into a video game or TV show or something. If you weren’t familiar with the original (as I was not), this flik doesn’t go out of its way to bring you up to speed.

The ton of money that obviously got thrown at the special effects can’t offset horribly trite dialog delivered in wooden fashion by semi-competent actors or the half-dozen el-cheapo sets that look like refugees from the collapse of the housing bubble. Chow Yun-Fat and Emmy Rossum (Christine from Phantom) evidently try to be good sports by acting down to the level of the cardboard cutouts around them. Randall Duk Kim (founder of American Players Theater and the Keymaker in The Matrix Reloaded) is good as Grandpa Gohan, tho.

The good guys (including 2 inexplicable Occidentals) are trying to recover all 7 of the ancient dragonballs that will keep the evil green-skinned Lord Piccolo from destroying the world. Piccolo and his henchwoman likewise use all sorts of skulduggery to claim the mcguffins for themselves. There’s a fair amount of martial arts, as everybody tries to 1-up everyone else with how good they are. Are they any good? Well, Chow obviously is, but everything else looks like quick-cut special effects.

There’s no need for anyone to issue spoiler alerts on this one, because everyone going into it knows exactly how it's going to turn out.

Frenetic, hackneyed, and preposterous tripe.

––––––

*short attention span synopsis

10:44 pm - Monsters vs. Connecticut

SASS*: Money doesn’t guarantee quality, but this week it’s the way to bet.

Rating scale: 9 (superlative) to 1 (execrable)

Short story: 9-7, recommended; 6-4, up to you; 3-1, eschew

Ratings intended for: adult SF&F fans

This Week’s SF&F Movies

Monsters vs. Aliens (PG, 1:34) — 7

(in both 2-D and 3-D at Eastgate, Point, Star, and Sundance; in Imax 3-D at Star)

This is a lot of low-key fun, as a small group of pretty easy-going “monsters” are released from decades of secret imprisonment by the government and, evidently bearing their erstwhile captors no ill will, help the US (“the only country where flying saucers ever seem to land”) fend off an invasion from an evil alien overlord. The invasion comes in 2 stages: 1st a gigantic robotic probe that our heroes battle on the Golden Gate Bridge, and 2nd the archfiend Gallaxhar himself and his army of not very perceptive clones. A 4-eyed squid descendant, he’s the sole survivor of his late planet, but he assures Susan, the 49’11”-tall woman, that she needn’t feel sorry for him, since he destroyed it himself.

You might think that a woman of that height would dominate every scene she’s in, but animation isn’t limited in scale, and the folx at Dreamworks weren’t just thinking big, they were thinking HUGE! Susan isn’t even the largest of Earth’s monsters; that would be the 350’-tall childlike Insectosaurus.

You might also think it would be a challenge to make the monsters (especially Dr. Cockroach and the slimy Missing Link) engaging and endearing, but Pixar showed the way back in 2001 with Monsters Inc., and this production is up to those standards in terms of both personality and technology. And the dimwitted but good-natured BOB the Blob is just a hoot.

The whole thing is played for chuckles, and they come at a nice, easy pace, not forced or frenetic. There are some good visual gags, too, including the president’s big red coffee-dispensing button on the wall of the war room and BOB’s romance with the lime Jell-O™.

I saw it in 3-D (tho not in Imax 3-D) and thot it enhanced the experience.

The Haunting in Connecticut (PG-13, 1:42) — 3

Ho-hum. Another formulaic tormented-spirit movie.

Years ago the house hosted seances conducted by the local mortician. Mysterious things happened. Dark doings were covered up. Spirits of the recently deceased were never released to their eternal destinies. They continue to hang around and annoy the house’s new occupants, who have problems enuf of their own without the added irritations. While the restless dead seek release, and are capable of manipulating all sorts of things in the real world (including carving arcane symbols on the body of a sleeping teenager who doesn’t seem to notice a problem until he wakes up), none of them ever seems to tumble to the idea of picking up a lipstick and writing a simple message on the bathroom mirror like “Hey, look behind the fireplace.”.

Virginia Madsen has stooped to this. How sad.

Shot in some house in Winnipeg. Should’ve been shot at conception in Hollywood. If you are the 1,433rd person to see it, congratulations, your ticket purchase means that Gold Circle Films has covered its production costs, which means we’ll keep getting more of these.

<lj-cut text="Ruminations on Progress">

Ruminations on “Progress”

Voice Acting

Remember Jodi Benson? No? She was the star of the best SF&F movie of 1989 (20 years ago) — better than Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Back to the Future Part 2, or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade — and I bet you remember who starred in those flix, don’t you?

Still not ringing any bells? She was Ariel in The Little Mermaid. But, of course, since it was animated, you didn’t actually see her, you only heard her. Her name didn’t appear on the poster or in the newspaper or TV ads. She was a voice actor, along with Christopher Daniel Barnes (Eric), Pat Carroll (Ursula), Paddi Edwards (Flotsam and Jetsam), Jason Marin (Flounder), Kenneth Mars (Triton), Samuel E. Wright (Sebastian), and Edie McClurg (Carlotta). ST:DS9 fans will perhaps recognize the name of Rene Auberjonois (Louis the Chef) from his role as Odo.

Probably the best voice actor ever in Hollywood was Marni Nixon, who did the singing for the soundtracks of countless musicals on behalf of actresses who could lip-synch but not otherwise match the crystal soprano that Nixon made to seem effortless. She had a tiny little on-screen role as Sister Sophia in The Sound of Music, but otherwise did her work out of sight.

Who will be the Marni Nixons of today and tomoro? Sadly, apparently nobody. Check out the cast for Monsters vs. Aliens: Reese Witherspoon (Susan), Seth Rogen (BOB), Hugh Laurie (Dr. Cockroach), Will Arnett (Missing Link), Kiefer Sutherland (Gen. Warren Monger), Rainn Wilson (Gallaxhar), Stephen Colbert (Pres. Hathaway), and Paul Rudd, Jeffrey Tambor, Amy Poehler, and Renee Zellweger in minor roles.

Do all the big-name actors pull in a bigger audience? They’d have to, to justify their paychecks. It’s not as if the theaters charge more per ticket for their presence. But then why soft-pedal their participation? Just as 20 years ago, you don’t see their names on the posters or in the ads. Are people more likely to go to see a movie because of who’s in it, if they can’t actually see the actors acting?

I think it’s sad to see voice acting apparently dying out as a career opportunity in Hollywood. Try as I might, I can’t hear anything better about Witherspoon’s voice than Benson’s. Unless you’ve got an actor with a truly unusual voice (like Paul Rubens, Jennifer Tilly, or Gilbert Gottfried) and you want the voice to stand out, why not give the job to someone who won’t charge premium bux for participating? What’s wrong with letting the non-megastars make an honest living, too?

3-D

There was justification for the actual voice of Al Jolson being delivered in The Jazz Singer. There was justification for the screen lighting up in Technicolor as Dorothy arrived in Oz. There was justification for the triple-wide Cinerama screen conveying the emptiness of interplanetary space in 2001: A Space Odyssey.**

I find myself straining to find a comparable justification for 3-D. Yes, it makes for a more enjoyable experience overall. It was 1 of 2 factors (the other being the fact that I’m a total slut for human space exploration) that saved last year’s Fly Me to the Moon from an utter bottom-feeder rating. And it made Monsters vs. Aliens more real-seeming, tho in a different way than chancing the “uncanny valley”, where animation approaches verisimilitude while falling disturbingly, creepily short of it (as in 2004’s The Polar Express).

But the earlier advances in the film-going experience didn’t require you to bring more than a standard-issue set of eyes and ears to the theater. Sound and color didn’t even require more money.*** Cinerama did, which may explain why it was never more than a niche phenomenon and showed only a bit more staying power than William Castle’s “Percepto” effect for The Tingler.

So, how’s 3-D going to shape up? To experience it, you need a set of special glasses. These have improved considerably thru the years and now fit comfortably over my regular glasses. The ones they dispense at the Imax theaters have very large lenses, which I appreciate. The ones I got at Point Cinema to view Monsters vs. Aliens had smaller lenses then my hornrims, which I found a bit restrictive at 1st but stopped noticing fairly quickly.

By some accounts, this is 8th generation 3-D tech, and they seem to have worked out most of the bugs. The headaches and nausea that some viewers reported in the past have apparently been vanquished. Color fringes, poor focus, and dual-image projections mismatched either in space or in time have been subjugated digitally. They’ve learned to amp up the projector lighting to compensate for the reduced luminance getting thru the 3-D glasses.

People who pay attention to this kind of thing have been impressed. Time magazine featured Jeffrey Katzenberg (the “K” in Dreamworks SKG), James Cameron, and Steven Spielberg and name-dropped Peter Jackson in its article “Are 3-D Movies Ready for Their Closeup?” (http://tinyurl.com/c9qd3r). But that was by techno-geek Josh Quittner, who loves technology for its own sake. Not a week later, Time’s resident movie critic, Richard Corliss, expressed his doubts in “3D or Not 3D: That Is the Question” (http://tinyurl.com/cfk8l2). Like Quittner, he too liked the tech; like me, he thot it added to the movie-going experience.

But, again like me, he questioned whether people would, in any large numbers, be willing to pay a couple of bux extra and have to fiddle with prosthetics to get the benefits.

I emerge from the analysis a tad more sanguine than Corliss, for several reasons. 1st off, to repeat, it really is a more engaging experience, which is why I recommend seeing Monsters vs. Aliens in that format.

2nd, I’ve often praised the geniuses at Pixar for understanding that the best animation tech in the world (which is what they’ve got) must always be subsidiary to telling a good story. The rest of the practitioners of 3-D seem to have finally learned that lesson as well. They no longer have yo-yos or spears or tomahawks stabbing out of the screen at your eyeballs just to show you they can. If it isn’t integral to the story, it’s not worth doing.

3rd, this isn’t going to become something universal, the way sound and color are. It’ll continue to be deployed where the creative folx think it’ll be most effective, the same way that split screens, time lapse, overlapping dialog, and aerial views have always been used for artistic effect.

4th, it’ll be something that sets the theater-going experience apart from DVD rentals or on-line viewing, which aren’t (yet) capable of doing 3-D. It’ll make theater-going a special occasion, much as it used to be.

As always, if you have a crappy story, no amount of 3-D or other gimmickry will cover up its failings. Story always comes 1st. But, if you’ve got a good enuf story and want to juice it up a bit, 3-D does that and, if judiciously deployed, will find an audience willing to pay extra and keep coming back for more.

Just spare us the yo-yos.

––––––

*short attention span synopsis

**No, Larry, no matter what you say, I wasn’t there for the 1st 2.

***Indeed, theaters that didn’t have to engage a piano player for every performance may have been able to get by more cheaply with the advent of talkies.

= = = = = =

12:03 am - Knowing Witch Mountain

 SASS*: Nothing to see here; move along.

Rating scale: 9 (superlative) to 1 (execrable)

Short story: 9-7, recommended; 6-4, up to you; 3-1, eschew

Ratings intended for: adult SF&F fans

This Week’s SF&F Movies

Race to Witch Mountain (PG, 1:38) — 4

(opened last week)

Dwayne Johnson plays Jack Bruno, Las Vegas cabbie, and Carla Gugino is Dr. Alex Friedman, UFO expert. Perhaps you saw the preview in which Bruno and Friedman are crawling thru a tubular tunnel and she admits to a bit of claustrophobia. Just then Bruno reaches an opening into a deep vertical shaft and asks “How are you with heights?”. It was a good scene, with a bit of low-key but contextually appropriate humor that the former Rock has learned to deliver effectively, making him a big, strapping brute of a guy that you feel comfortable with. But that scene isn’t in the film itself. Instead, we see the aftermath, in which Friedman is still a bit freaked out, for no apparent reason.

The rest of the movie was like that, too. People seemed to be doing things with no credible motives. The 2 adults flee from no fewer than 4 sets of pursuers exhibiting varying degrees of hostility (The Government, a space-alien cross between Predator and Inspector Javert, Bruno’s former mob boss Mr. Wolf and his henchthugs, and the LVPD). They do so to protect 2 teenage Swedish, I mean space, aliens who are here to retrieve the mcguffin, um, recording device that will prevent their planet from launching a hostile takeover, uh, invasion. The gal of the pair, Sara, is played by AnnaSophia Robb. We know from her performance in Bridge to Terabithia (2007, 9**) that she can be a tremendously appealing young actress, but here she gets to do stuff like pointing her finger and monotonically saying “Go that way, Jack Bruno.”. The boy, Seth, is played by Alexander Ludwig, a cipher.

The government’s head alien tracker warns Bruno that the kids are not what they seem to be. Anyone who’s ever seen a science-fiction movie (which apparently includes precisely zero of any characters who are actually in an SF movie) can only begin to imagine what might lurk beneath those placid blond exteriors, but this proves singularly untroubling for Bruno, leading right up to the snuggle-bunny ending (Disney, y’know), which was likewise not well set up by any of the preceding events.

The scenes set at a UFO convention make good sport of fannish stereotypes, which some people might find offensive but I choose to treat as endearing. And I loved the sly humor that they did leave in the script, wherein Bruno asks the kids “Do you know how to fly this [flying saucer]?”, they respond “How do you think we got here?”, and he replies “Well, you crashed!”. More of that, from another couple of passes thru the typer, would have earned this one an upgrade.

Knowing (PG-13, 2:01) — 4

Harrison Ford is clearly the most famous actor with a long history of SF&F films, but Tom Cruise had a nice little run of his own (Vanilla Sky, 2001, 7; Minority Report, 2002, 8; War of the Worlds, 2005, 5). We’ll pass quietly over Keanu Reeves. Brendan Fraser has made a career, if not exactly a name, in the genre. And now we need to acknowledge that Nicolas Cage is lending his considerable screen cred to our favorite kind of flix. The question going into this TEOTWAWKI epic is whether it would be a splendid effort like Next (2007, 8) or a disappointment like Ghost Rider (2007, 5). Alas, it’s a fuddled testimonial to Calvinism’s doctrine of predestination.

50 years ago, kids in suburban Massachusetts did a bunch of drawings intended for their new elementary school’s time capsule — except for 1 odd little girl, who just filled her paper with endless digits. Cut to 2009, where that paper winds up in the hands of little Caleb Koestler, son of widowed and cynical MIT professor John Koestler (Cage). Among the plethora of digits is the string “911012996”. Now, you might think that it was the “911” that captured Koestler’s attention, but no; he writes the string on a whiteboard and then spends some time mulling where to put the slash marks. The “2996” is, of course, the death toll on that fateful day, and Koestler soon discovers the dates and fatality counts of many other disasters in the previous half century — plus 3 that are slotted for the next couple of days. Every such entry is also trailed by a string of other digits, and the genii at MIT are unable to figure out at 1st what they mean. (Of my 1st 2 instantaneous hypotheses — location and junk DNA — the more obvious proved correct.) But it’s asinine for a fellow prof to liken the predictions to numerology (as in The Number 23) or suggest that maybe Koestler is following in the delusional footsteps of John Nash (brilliantly depicted in A Beautiful Mind) when the numbers are so clearly related to real, and supposedly unpredictable, events.

Koestler tries to prevent the predicted disasters, but to no avail. Evidently it’s all been written down in the Big Book in the Sky eons ago, and mere mortals are powerless before destiny. It goes on like this, getting progressively gloomier, until we arrive at an improbable ending that makes The Day the Earth Stood Still look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

The acting and effects are quite convincing while you’re in the theater, the kids are cute, and the dialog (under the circumstances) is realistic, so the flik isn’t an absolute dog.

Still in Theaters

Bedtime Stories — 6

Coraline — 8 (in 3-D at Star and Sundance)

Twilight — 7

Watchmen — 9 (in Imax at Star)

Mark Your Calendars

Mar. 27: The Haunting in Connecticut (OK, maybe don’t mark this one)

Mar. 27: Monsters vs. Aliens

Apr. 8: Dragonball: Evolution

Apr. 17: 17 Again

Apr. 24 (maybe): Mutant Chronicles

May 1: Battle for Terra

May 1: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

May 8: Star Trek

May 21: Terminator Salvation

May 22: Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

May 29: Drag Me to Hell

May 29: Up

June 5: Land of the Lost

June 12: Moon

June 19: Year 1

June 24: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

July 1: Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

July 17: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

July 24: G-Force (not the Packers, they’re guinea pigs)

July 31: They Came from Upstairs

Aug. 7: Shorts (kids discover magic rocks)

Aug. 14: District 9

Aug. 14: The Time Traveler’s Wife (adapted? from the novel)

Aug. 28: Final (hah!) Destination: Death Trip 3D

Sep. 4: Game

Sep. 4: Pandorum

Sep. 9: 9 (Get it? 9/9/09! Do not confuse with “Nine”, a musical remake of “8 1/2”)

Sep. 18: Jennifer’s Body (demonic castration paranoia from Diablo Cody)

Sep. 18: Splice

Sep. 23: Astro Boy

Sep. 25: The Crazies

Sep. 25: Surrogates

Sep. 25: This Side of the Truth

Oct. 9: Zombieland

Oct. 16: Where the Wild Things Are

Oct. 30: The Box

Nov. 6: The Wolf Man

Nov. 13: 2012

Dec. 11: The Lovely Bones

Not Sayin’: The Road

Maybe Next Year: Timecrimes

––––––

*short attention span synopsis

**best SF&F film of the 21st Century so far

11:07 pm - The Other Tournament

Isthmus Letters

06:52 pm - They're NOT "Martyrs", Dammit!

2009 March 9

Letters to the Editor

Time

letters@time.com

Re: The Making of a Mumbai Terrorist

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1883334,00.html

You’ve done it again.

By referring to thugs like Mohammad Amir Ajmal Qasab and his ilk as “martyrs”, you do to the English language what they did to the innocent commuters in Victoria Terminus.

A true martyr is a victim, not a perpetrator. A true martyr wants to live, not to die. A true martyr is helpless to prevent his fate, not someone who could walk away at any time. A true martyr is on the receiving end of an unjust, repressive, intolerant regime, not someone who’s trying to create one. Most true martyrs suffer long, agonizing deaths, not the quick, painless ones favored by suicide bombers.

Most salient of all, a true martyr dies alone; he doesn’t take scores of helpless, unthreatening men, women, and children with him.

You have a clear-cut alternative available. There is undoubtedly some word that these butchers use to refer to themselves. You could simply cite that word in the original Arabic, rather than continue to use your mistranslation of it to sully the memory of real martyrs (for whom we should feel sorrow, sympathy, and respect) by lumping them together with these deranged criminals (for whom we should feel nothing but contempt and loathing). 

12:05 pm - Watchmen

 SASS*: Quis custodies custodiet? You should.

Rating scale: 9 (superlative) to 1 (execrable)

Short story: 9-7, recommended; 6-4, up to you; 3-1, eschew

Ratings intended for: adult SF&F fans

Watchmen (R, 2:37, Imax at Star) — 9

( Lengthy reflections on SF&F, adaptations, critical respect, etc. here ... )

08:25 am - Life Priorities

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”  — Socrates

= = = = = =

Every now and again you get a chance to think about what’s truly important to you. Regrettably, these chances will often arrive at moments of crisis, when your thinking tools are probably not at their finest.

Last night, however, I had an opportunity to reflect on my life priorities in a pleasant and relaxed setting. I was attending a lecture by philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, sponsored by the Wisconsin Union Directorate as the last installment of their 2008-2009 Distinguished Lecture Series. (And distinguished indeed it is. You can find out about this past season’s events at their website, http://www.union.wisc.edu/DLS/.)

The sponsoring committee (entirely student-run) used the occasion to poll the audience about what speakers they’d like to invite for next year’s series. I jotted down the family names of the people on the ballot:

Brooks

Carter

Clinton

Easterly

Edmonds

Enriquez

Feldman

Fey

Finkelstein

Freeman

Friedman

Galloway

Ghani

Gladwell

Glenn

Goodman

Hamre

Hawking

hooks

Kamkwamba

Kristof

Levitt

Nye

O’Connor

Paulson

Pinker

Plouffe

Pollan

Ramachandran

Randi

Robinson

Rothemund

Roy

Sacks

Savage/Hyneman

Sen

Shakur

Stewart

Stossel

Tanenhaus

Venter

Wiesel

Zakaria

While there are a lot of famous people on that list, you probably don’t recognize all the names; I sure didn’t. But among them are actors, astronauts, comedians, economists, feminists, government officials (current and past), humanitarians, journalists, lawyers, philosophers, politicians, scientists, and writers — a potpourri of intellectuals from across the spectrum — along with a 1-line summary of what they were most likely to talk about.

Choose 5. You’ve got about 10-15 minutes to review the list and pick your faves.

This isn’t a process that lends itself to detailed analysis, but neither are you being pressured into a snap decision. I fairly quickly picked my top 3, then spent some additional minutes dithering over who would get my last 2 votes. This is the list I finally came up with, in alphabetical order:

William Jefferson Clinton, 42nd president of the US

Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist

Steven Pinker, evolutionary psycho-linguist

James Randi, magician and debunker of pseudoscience

Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, hosts of Mythbusters

Not until after I’d made my choices did I recognize the pattern. While all of the speakers had considerable allure, and I would gladly have attended a lecture by almost any of them, my favorites were the ones who use the scientific method to describe how the world really works.

I surprised myself a bit with this. Yes, my background is in the sciences, but lately I’ve been spending a lot of time on politics. Thru my association with WisCon, I’ve developed a deep interest in feminist issues. And I’m absolutely addicted to Jon Stewart’s fake-news program on Comedy Central. But I passed up worthies like Fareed Zakaria, bell hooks, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Stewart in favor of the science geeks. (The exception, of course, was Bill Clinton, whose name was the 1st one I circled. I couldn’t really tell you why; I suppose it has something to do with Monica Lewinsky’s comment that “He’s an incredibly charismatic man.”.)

Anyway, this little “out of the blue” exercise gave me a chance to reflect on my priorities in life, and I guess I’m pretty happy with them.

Now I must go renew my subscription to Skeptical Inquirer.

PS: Dennett’s lecture was terrific!

PPS: If George W. Bush had been on the list, I would probably have voted for him, but for entirely different reasons than all the others.

= = = = = =

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

05:23 pm - Street Fighter

SASS*: Wait for Watchmen.

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (PG-13, 1:36) — 3

Always a crapshoot when you base a movie on a video game. Things this one had going for it:

 • Kick-ass female protagonist, Chun-Li, played by ...

 • Kristin Kreuk (Lana Lang on Smallville)

 • Respect for the locales and cultures in Hong Kong and Bangkok (some subtitles)

Regrettably, that was about it. The story had some promise but was ruined by terrible writing and the worst individual acting performance I’ve seen in years (Chris Klein as Nash of Interpol).

2 SF&F elements: (1) the good guys could conjure up scintillating globes of force; (2) the bad guy was able to transfer all his goodness into the soul of his unborn dotter. Those 2 accounted for maybe 4 minutes total and weren’t integral to the plot. Otherwise it was mainly whack, bash, kick (none done memorably), and occasionally shoot.

–––––

*Short Attention Span Synopsis

= = = = = =

He who lives by fighting with an enemy has an interest in the preservation of the enemy's life.