Month: February 2004

Over at Terminus, Drew Vogel has arrived at his review of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the course of his ongoing look at all of Stanley Kubrick’s films.

What always gets me about this film is the minutiae of the daily-life details Kubrick has in the background. There’s the famous shot of the flight attendant walking up the circular wall before delivering food to the pilots, and Heywood Floyd’s phone call to Earth, but there’s a lot of other small-scale detail in the course of the movie. Consider Dr. Floyd’s briefing of the scientists at the Clavius Base: it’s free of the kind of pretentious “movie speak” that a lesser film would have used, and a surprising amount of Floyd’s verbiage in that scene is devoted to bureaucratic administrativia. And a few minutes later, while Floyd rides a shuttle with a couple of scientists out to where the lunar monolith has been “unearthed”, they crack open a cooler and eat sandwiches. Imagine that: these fellows are on their way out to see the first true evidence of extraterrestrial life ever found, and they’re saying things like, “What is this, chicken?” “Yeah, looks like it. Got any coffee?”

Incidentally, this kind of detail — the fact that this is a place, with people doing everyday stuff there — is one facet of why I love the Star Wars movies so much. One of the best “tiny details” of this sort comes in the scene where Ben Kenobi is cutting the power to the tractor beam: while he’s working, two stormtroopers are standing near the door, just shootin’ the breeze:

“You know what’s going on?”

“I dunno, maybe it’s another drill.”

“Hey, have you seen that new BT-16?”

“Yeah, some of the other guys were telling me about that. They said it’s quite a thing to see.”

I love stuff like that.

One of the most haunting aspects of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001, which wasn’t reflected in the movie, is how Dave Bowman carries on after he has to pull Hal’s plug and everyone else on the Discovery is dead. In the book, Bowman buries himself in routine, and struggles to maintain some connection to the human race from which he is now separated by millions of miles. It’s all very startling, and I’ve always appreciated how Clarke depicts Bowman’s struggle to maintain his rationality in the face of wonder mounting upon wonder. In this way, the book exceeds the film.

Drew is correct that 2001 should not really be seen in connection with the sequel 2010, although the latter is a decent enough film that really doesn’t hurt anything.

Share This Post

I think that some scientist should identify just why it is that Heavy Metal, which I watched a few nights ago, is incredibly bad if one starts watching it sober, but gets better and better and better until it’s the greatest cinematic journey since Lawrence of Arabia if one drinks beer during the screening at the rate of one 12 oz. beer every fifteen minutes.

I mean, the movie’s just dorky as hell, but if one drinks enough while watching it, it slowly becomes endearing — and when the space ship that’s shaped like the 1970s “Have a nice day!” happy face shows up, well, at that point you just kind of sit back and grin — which happens to be what the two stoner-aliens piloting that spaceship do at that point, as well. And when Tarna shows up….geez, just thinking about it makes me want to crack open a beer. And I’m writing this on Sunday morning.

Share This Post

For the first time in the year I’ve been with them, one of my reviews is granted “Feature Review” status at Green Man Review. The review in question is Guy Gavriel Kay’s new novel, The Last Light of the Sun, which should be available for purchase in Canada this week and in the US sometime in the next month. Scoring advance review copies of books rules, and getting one of Kay’s — well, that’s just golden.

I also have a review up of a children’s picture book called Hello, Harvest Moon.

Share This Post

Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple, in cupcake form. Because, you know, what’s the point of a national scandal — even so lame a scandal as this one — if you can’t memorialize it in a bit of pastry and icing?

(via Outside Counsel)

Share This Post

I hate it when I’m channel-flipping and I catch the last minute or so of a sketch on some comedy show which I suspect I would have really wanted to see in its entirety. Case in point: I flipped past FOX a short while ago, and MAD TV had a bit in which Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was crossed with The Apprentice.

In the bit I saw, an actor playing Donald Trump in an outfit that was part business suit, part whacky-suit a la Gene Wilder, and he was singing to the winning contestant of The Apprentice as the glass elevator of Trump Tower shot up toward the sky and out of the building.

Then the sketch cuts to a news anchor sitting at a desk, reporting that the Air Force has shot down a glass elevator that was flying unauthorized NYC airspace, and that President Bush has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to devote resources to “terrorist magic elevators”.

Hell, I don’t know, maybe the sketch sucked. But it sure sounds funny.

(Which reminds me of Al Gore’s stint as Saturday Night Live host last year: my favorite sketch of that episode was when Gore played — you guessed it — Willy Wonka’s accountant brother, the guy responsible for working the financing of a factory whose labor force is Oompa Loompas and which uses a river and waterfall as a stirring mechanism. For some reason, I just found Al Gore, dressed up in dusty Dickensian rags and barking lines like “You hear that, Willy? We’re Oompa-Loompa-Doompity-Screwed!”, absolutely hilarious.)

Share This Post

I just have to say that I’d have a lot more respect for Janet Jackson if she’d just say, “Yeah, I displayed my breast on national TV for 1.9 seconds. Deal with it, you bunch of puritanical nutjobs.” Especially after reading Peggy Noonan’s latest screed in which she wrings her no-doubt icy hands. I think that Noonan has been playing some right-wing weirdo variant of the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Game”, in which any event at all is connected with 9-11-01:

“I pulled my car into the carwash yesterday, and immediately after driving away with my pristinely shining new body and windshield so clear it’s almost like I could reach right through it and touch the clouds where the little birdies frolic. But the illusion was spoiled when a monarch butterfly was caught in a downdraft, and found itself striking my windshield with such force that its poor, delicate body was splattered across the glass. And yet, as I looked upon that orange smear that had formerly been a pretty little butterfly, I had to think back to that day, that horrible day, when I found myself next to some guy who was no doubt thinking the exact same things I’m thinking now. And I think of 9-11, and all the little butterflies, and I realize that America’s values are butterflies splatting upon the windshield of liberals.”

I do wish, though, that someone would make a videotape of Noonan while she writes a column, just because I always wonder if she tosses her head while writing like she does while speaking on live TV. Over to you, Bob.

(link via TBogg, who is in the process of a redesign. Not that he asked my two cents, but he should keep the archives — just move them down to the bottom of the sidebar, if need be — and correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think one needs to “upgrade” to use Blogger’s RSS feature. I’m using it, and I’ve never upgraded anything.)

Share This Post

The Bills are apparently close to bringing onto their coaching staff someone I’ve never much liked: former Bengals and Buccaneers head man Sam Wyche. I suppose he could be OK, but Wyche really isn’t one of my more-liked football people. Oh well.

Share This Post

No, I didn’t post anything yesterday. No real reason, outside of the fact that I was pretty tired and just didn’t have anything cogent to say. (Leaving aside, of course, the issue of whether I ever have anything cogent to say.)

Anyway, here’s what would have been the Friday Burst. I was just starting my freshman year of college when the Berlin Wall fell and the process of German reunification began, and since I was away from home for the first extended time in my life and that I was deep into my studies, I regretfully don’t have as full a sense of living through that period of history that I do from living through other things that have transpired in my life — my memories of the Iranian hostage crisis, for example, are more vivid even though they took place when I was in third and fourth grade.

So, I am prepared to grant that my sense of history surrounding the Fall of Communism is not what it should be; even so, however, I am not prepared to grant that I missed the seminal contribution of David Hasselhoff.

(via Warren Ellis.)

Share This Post

The Butterfly Nebula.

I was a bit busy this week, for obvious reasons, so I didn’t do a whole lot of looking for images. So I resorted to pilfering yet another cool image from the fine folks at NASA.

Share This Post

You know the site TinyURL.com, which you use to make very short URLs out of really long ones? Well, Patrick Nielsen Hayden points out the reverse: HugeURL.com.

(OK, I had a Huge URL for use here, but it ended up making the blog into this horrible distended thing that required immense scrolling to use. So just take my word for it, OK?)

Share This Post