Month: September 2003

The wife and I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean yesterday, and we had probably the best time at the movies that we’ve had in a long time. Sure, we’ve seen better or greater movies, but this one was more plain fun than anything. I found it crafty, witty, and basically a rollicking-good time. Of course, I’m predisposed to liking pirate movies in general – – I enjoyed Cutthroat Island, for corn’s sakes – – but this thing just delighted me, to no end.

I love watching scenery-chewing actors, bellowing orders for their scurvy-dog crewmen to unleash the halyards or whatever. I love the backstabbing treachery that’s a part of every great pirate movie. I love the secret treasure hordes, the damsels who in pirate movies always seem to be more than mere shrieking damsels. All of it’s good. I read some reviews that say that Pirates of the Caribbean is too long, but I did not find it too long at all. Johnny Depp played the most interesting pirate I’ve seen in some time, Orlando Bloom shows that he has a future ahead of him once Legolas is done with, et cetera.

I did think that the film pushed the fight scenes between the living warriors and the undead ones a bit far. I wanted to know what would happen to those three undead whom Orlando Bloom blows to bits at the end, what would happen if one got beheaded, et cetera. The idea is clearly that eventually the undead would win by sheer attrition, but it felt like it should have happened sooner, with the “good guys” not really doing much damage to slow them down. But that’s a quibble. The supernatural element was a pretty nifty twist on the whole pirate story.

Klaus Badelt’s music score was just OK – – it did the job, but it wasn’t particularly memorable. It certainly did not make me come close to forgetting Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s scores to The Sea Hawk or Captain Blood, and I was distressed that he borrowed from James Horner’s bag-of-tricks, of all people (the suspense music with the shakuhachi flute ostinato).

I don’t know if the pirate movie can ever really make a full-fledged comeback, but it would be nice to see a good one more than just every ten years or so.

Before the movie, we saw a preview for the next Disney movie based on a ride, The Haunted Mansion. That might be fun. I’ve always liked Eddie Murphy and dearly wish he hadn’t spent so much time making bad movies. Oh, and we walked into the theater in the midst of a preview for some new movie starring Rob Lowe as a Washington, DC lawyer…only it wasn’t a preview for a movie. It was an ad for that Lyons’ Den TV show that’s starting up on NBC soon. Now I gotta watch ads for TV shows at the movies?

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Thanks to the efforts of a friend, I got to see The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes recently. I enjoyed this movie a good deal, although I enjoyed it more for the “Private Life” stuff than for the film’s actual mystery story. The film’s first half-hour or so is delightful, and the two actors playing Holmes and Watson are excellent, with good chemistry. The score gave me some pause, though: it is by Miklos Rozsa, and is wonderful music in itself (based, in large part, on Rozsa’s own Violin Concerto). But I found the music’s Hungarian character a bit at odds with the film’s British settings. (Rozsa himself makes a cameo in the film, as – – what else? – – an orchestra conductor.)

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I don’t mean to keep beating 9-11-01 into the ground, but John Hardy, one of my fellows over at Collaboratory, posted another aerial (or space-based) photograph of the post-attack WTC site. What struck me about this photo is that, even though it was clearly taken within weeks of the attacks, there is a small park visible about four blocks away from the site that is still green.

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For years, my main hangout spots on the Net were Usenet newsgroups, which I have just about left behind completely. Blogistan, I am finding, is a much more convivial place, for a lot of reasons.

The biggest reason is that Usenet groups are divided by category and subject, whereas blogs are not. On Usenet, this is a device of convenience: if you want to discuss, say, science fiction books, you find the newsgroup specifically devoted to them, and there you will find (theoretically) lots of people of similar interest. But problems then crop up: some active newsgroup participants tend to be militant about remaining “on topic” (i.e., “This is rec.art.sf.written. Don’t mention movies here.”), where others are more forgiving. One person on rec.arts.books (a group which I have not read in over two years now) once described this conundrum this way: “Some people view rec.arts.books as a place to discuss books and nothing else; others view it as a place for bookish people to discuss anything they like.” But with blogs, the only topical constraints are self-imposed by the person writing the blog.

And that leads me to what makes Blogistan a more friendly place, even if there are occasional outbreaks of scandal and whatnot. With the pressure of topicality removed, or placed into the purview of the blogger him- or herself, it’s a lot easier to get a handle on a blogger’s personality than it is on Usenet. On newsgroups, I often observed (and occasionally fell victim to) instances of posters forming allegiances with one another on one contentious topic, only to discover later on that they disagreed vehemently on another topic. And almost always, whenever this happened, the earlier civility was completely forgotten as the new enmities took over. The short version of this is that respect, in Blogistan, seems to be more robust than on Usenet.

This is just my experience, of course, and as always, nothing I say in this post should be interpreted as having any larger point than simply reporting my own experience. Except, of course, for when I am completely correct in every way. Or something like that.

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If you take a photograph of Johnny Cash from his later years when his hair was gray, and you shrink it down to thumbnail size, he looks a lot like George Washington.

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The emergence of an “Artist’s Quarter” in Blogistan is an encouraging development. A pretty good one, fairly new, that I’ve been following for a few weeks now is Ionarts, which has a nifty design, to boot. Check it out. Particularly notable is the ongoing reading project there, comprising nearly every significant work of literature to ever be set in, or around, Paris.

(I’d credit where I first saw Ionarts listed, but I can’t remember if it was Lynn Sislo or the Blowhards, so I’ll just mention both. And now it suddenly occurs to me that I’d pay to hear a rock band called “Lynn Sislo and the Blowhards”.)

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Alexandra points out a quite wonderful 9-11-01 remembrance that happens to feature my favorite bit from Shakespeare.

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In today’s bit of link-pilfering (this time from John Scalzi, a.k.a. Mr. “One Blog Just Ain’t Enough!”) we have The Museum of Unworkable Devices, devoted to perpetual motion, which as John notes is impossible by the laws of physics but not at all impossible by the laws of four-year-olds.

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A lot of bloggers are pointing to this list of Twenty Unanswered Questions About 9-11-01, so I might as well join the crowd. I’d like to know the answers to a lot of these, myself.

I find #7 a bit troubling, though. Try as I might to get mad at President Bush about this, I really can’t do it. I have wondered why the Secret Service did not immediately intercede and insist on moving the President to a secure location, but that probably falls into the realm of military response and that kind of thing of which I have little knowledge. My suspicion is that, in times like that, a President will generally defer to the people around him – – his security people, his generals, et cetera. If their word was “We don’t know what the hell’s going on yet”, it seems clear to me that they’d keep him there.

The article asks, “Why didn’t he take more decisive action?” I’m really not sure at all what action he could have taken in those moments. As for sitting there reading with the children, well – – the placement looks bad by virtue of contrast between where he was, at that moment, and what was happening in Lower Manhattan (and soon to unfold at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania). Mr. Bush’s position was probably “Until we know what’s going on and what we’re doing, let’s not scare these kids unnecessarily.” And I really can’t fault him for that.

Ultimately, this list of questions makes me realize that although we think we know exactly what happened on that day, because we were alive and we watched it on TV and in some cases we were there, we really don’t know. I commented on Thursday that we are going to see 9-11-01 become, unavoidably, less “our day of infamy” and more an object of historical study, and this list of questions points the way. Twenty, thirty, forty years from now — and longer than that, really — people will write about 9-11-01, and they will ask questions about it. Government documents will be examined. Histories will be written. Multiple theories as to what occurred, and why, will arise, and some of them will be in conflict. Those of us who lived through that day will likely have a hard time reconciling those histories with our memories, but that’s the way it will be. It always is.

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Greg Harris lists a few guilty pleasures. I often have trouble with listing guilty pleasures, because I view the definition of “guilty pleasure” as “something you like, when you know you shouldn’t”. My problem is that, even when I like something most people hate, I rarely view it as a guilty pleasure and more as a case of me seeing something in it that no one else does. In other words, I’m right and they’re wrong. Like with the Star Wars prequels. They’re good movies, and if you don’t like them, then you’re a pinhead. So there.

But I suppose I can come up with a few that fill the bill. Most are movies.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Yeah, Costner’s accent is nonexistent; but the movie’s grasp of history is so unbelievably bad that even now I can’t believe that Costner’s accent is the most often-cited problem with this movie. I don’t know, maybe it’s Alan Rickman spitting out lines like “No more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas!”. But I can’t dislike the movie.

Independence Day. This movie’s opening act is one of the best ever, even if the science is absolutely laughable (do you have any idea how much energy it would take to slow down an object that is one-fourth the size of the Moon>). And there are other staggering plot holes in the movie: “Wow, Will Smith is such a good pilot that he managed to spot a top-secret government facility that no one’s known about for fifty years from the air, all while being chased by an alien spaceship!” “Wow, somehow the government managed to keep that facility secret for fifty years despite the fact that it’s visible enough for Will Smith to spot while executing evasive maneuvers overhead!” Poor Mary McDonnell has what might be the most pointless death scene in all of cinema, and I wonder if a sequel would have a scene in which Jeff Goldblum, learning that the aliens are coming back, says, “Don’t worry. I beat ’em with a 1995 Powerbook last time, and now I’ve got a 2003 Powerbook. They’re toast.” But crap, the movie’s got such a sense of over-the-top goofy fun that I can’t hate it.

Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can. I’m stretching, here, because I honestly love these two movies. Clint Eastwood, Geoffrey Lewis (an underused actor if ever there was one), bareknuckle fighting, an inept motorcycle gang, barroom brawls, country music from before the “Rockabilly” types took over, and an orangutan named Clyde. What’s not to love? (Well, I could do without the old guy in the second movie who actually has a sexual fantasy about Ruth Gordon.)

Flash Gordon. Another movie that plants its feet firmly on the dividing line between “Whiz bang fun!” and “Friggin’ laughable!”, and stays there for the whole running time.

And finally, for the record, Buffalo-style chicken wings are not a guilty pleasure. Yes, I love them. Yes, they’re incredibly bad for you. No, I do not feel the slightest bit of guilt when I eat them, although that’s rare these days.

(It occurs to me that the contents of this post may be repeating a post or two I have written in the past. Oh well.)

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