Month: June 2006

So I saw Superman Returns last night.

I thought it was a terrific entertainment, a wonderful time, and I loved it. Seriously: this movie felt like a warm, fuzzy blanket for the eight-year-old geek who lives inside me. But wow, it could have been utterly great. In the film’s zeal to recreate the magic of the 1978 Richard Donner film, it missed a number of opportunities. But it was so damned cheerful in missing those opportunities that most of me is saying, “Meh, who cares? They can do all that next time.”

(Spoilers follow, by the way. I make no effort to pussyfoot around stuff, so if you’re trying to preserve a “virgin” Superman experience, don’t read this post.)

OK. Spoiler time, in “grab-bag” bullet-point style:

:: This is twice in a week that I’ve seen a movie that took its sweet time telling its story. (Cars was the first. I’ll post about that one in a day or two.) And you know what? I found it really refreshing. Superman Returns involved me in its world, pulled me in, and held me there for a while. So many times I get the feeling that movies want to shake me up a bit and then toss me out into the street, like a really fun roller coaster for which you wait ninety minutes in line for a ride that lasts two minutes.

I’m probably the ideal person for whom this movie was made: for me, the 1978 Superman film sets the icon of Superman in stone. That’s how I view the character, it’s how I envision Krypton and Smallville and Lex Luthor and all the rest of it. This movie goes to occasionally astonishing lengths to recapture that “world”, instead of just coming up with a totally new retelling of the Superman story. I liked that, a lot. In terms of influence on my love of the fantastic, Superman: The Movie is very close to Star Wars with me, so much so that I’m more interested in that movie than the character of Superman in general. When DC Comics relaunched the character in the late 80s with John Byrne’s Man of Steel series, my basic reaction was, “Well, OK” — even though it postulated a Clark Kent who’d actually been allowed to play high school football.

So if you can take or leave Superman: The Movie, you may not get what Superman Returns is attempting.

:: Brandon Routh was perfectly fine as Superman. I would have liked to have seen less of “Clark Kent, bumbling buttoned-down nerd”, though.

:: Lex Luthor’s plot makes absolutely no sense, of course. But I liked that he’s still obsessed with real estate. (In the 1978 film, did he really think that if he’d succeeded in knocking California into the Pacific, the US Government wouldn’t have seized all that land he’d just bought under eminent domain? That’s the kind of stuff you’re not supposed to think about in a Superman movie.)

:: In the Batman movies, it’s always blatantly clear that Gotham doesn’t exist anywhere. It’s a totally fanciful creation. (I haven’t seen Batman Begins in its entirety, so I can’t vouch for Gotham in that film.) But Metropolis is different, isn’t it? In the first four Superman films, Metropolis is clearly New York City. Superman and Lois Lane fly over the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty; there are aerial shots of Manhattan; one sequence takes place in Grand Central Station; and so on.

But in Superman Returns, the “Metropolis as NYC” angle is no longer there. It took me a while to realize it, but that isn’t Manhattan in this movie. In fact, it isn’t any city. It’s a pure digital creation, and it looks totally real, for the most part.

I wonder if director Bryan Singer made it this way in order to visually deflect the inevitable question of whether 9-11 happened while Superman was away.

:: The Kid didn’t bother me. He did pretty well, actually, and I am supremely grateful that the script didn’t give the kid a “Wesley saves the Enterprise” moment, except for the single moment when he kills a baddie with a piano. Still, I hope that The Kid isn’t a centerpiece for the plots of future Superman movies.

The way Superman echoes to his son the last things that Jor-El said to him, as a baby on Krypton before being launched into space, was a wonderful moment.

:: Still on the Kid: the manner in which he ends up captive along with Lois Lane may well rank among the top five stupidest things I’ve ever seen a movie character do. Jee-bus, Lois, get a friggin’ clue.

:: Loose threads department: so, did Superman push the Growing Hunk o’ Kryptonite into the sun, or is that thing now in the Solar System too? Is it still growing? Will its orbit bring it periodically close enough to Earth to disrupt Superman’s powers? Will that thing be a plot point in future movies?

:: Frank Langella was terrific. And he also appears to have really long fingers. (The things you notice!)

:: When Superman first arrives on the scene again, after the plane rescue, he stands there and basks in the glory. Heavens, he seems to enjoy it. What happened to the “Don’t thank me, we’re all part of the same team!” guy? And what was up with the scene in which he’s pretty much of a Super Stalker, spying on Lois’s family? The subtext there was pretty creepy, if you ask me.

:: OK, here’s the thing. Lots of made of how hurt Lois Lane was that Superman went away for five years, but what about the world? Wouldn’t people be resentful? They’ve just awarded Lois Lane a Pulitzer for telling the world that they don’t need Superman, after all.

And how did he leave, anyway? Did he make an announcement to the world, or did he just up and go, leaving everyone to figure out that he’d gone when the crime rate in Metropolis suddenly went up? There’s a whole interesting tale to be told not in Superman’s return, but in his absence. None of that is here.

:: Finally, how much of the continuity from the original films are in play? It’s pretty clear that the events of Superman II happened, so are General Zod and friends still around?

:: Over on the FSM boards, lots of people are burning the score for this film in effigy, but I rather enjoyed it. I liked hearing the “Growing Up” theme from the first film, especially since it’s one of John Williams’s most gorgeous melodies and it only occurs in one scene of one movie. I also loved how John Ottman scored this film’s “Superman and Lois flying” sequence — since Lois is now resisting her attraction to Superman, it made perfect sense to me that the music for this sequence kept referencing the classic “Can You Read My Mind” love theme without coming out and giving it a full-throated statement.

I’m strangely conflicted about Superman Returns. Part of me sees lots of problems with it, while another part was just so damned satisfied with it! Strange.

Now, if we can just get that Wonder Woman movie….

(Oh, and I saw a trailer for Spiderman 3. It pisses me off that apparently they have enough footage to make a trailer that good, and still we have to wait until next May for the damn movie. Yeesh.)

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Sorry, folks, but I’m bushed this evening. I assisted with a Big Special Project at The Store today, which required my presence there at 5:00 a.m. So right now my impetus for blogging is consists of little more than staring slack-jawed at the computer, clicking the mouse, and keeping that glob of drool from plummeting from my mouth to the tabletop. So I’ll be doing Sentential Links tomorrow, when I have a bit more wind beneath my sails.

For now, just a couple items:

:: Man, is anyone else out there a new MySpace.com user who finds the whole thing a tad creepy? The only reason I signed up was to basically stick a link from there to here, on the off chance that any old friends with whom I’ve lost contact over the years are also MySpace users. Hasn’t turned out that way, really. I’ve added some people who have requested “friend” status, but I’m wondering why I bothered, because I have yet to see a single hit in my referrals from MySpace. And one person actually phrased his friends-request to me that I seem cute and funny, which baffled me because “cute” isn’t generally something that guys cite about other guys, and this person’s profile indicates that he is straight. Can it be that he looked at my name and my long hair in the photo and assumed that I’m a woman? Aieee!!! Granted, my beard isn’t all that prominent in the photo I use there, but my profile clearly indicates that I’m male and my blurb-thing refers to The Wife. Color me confoozled. Anyway, MySpace doesn’t strike me as being terribly useful or even much fun, aside from my ability to search out folks who attended my high school and college. It’s certainly not going to replace my Blogger account, by any means.

:: Scotty has details on BloggerCon Episode IV: Bloggers in the Park. Check out his suggestions and comment. Our shelter will be near the hill from which the view of the Buffalo-Niagara region is spectacular, so hope for a non-humid day so the view will be special! I’ve already stated that I’ll bring a lot of plates, cups, utensils, and napkins; and I’ll also use this event as my reason to thaw out the Polish sausage that’s sitting in my freezer.

(I should note that, during the height of the recent Sabres playoff run — before the Injury Gods decided to set up permanent camp in HSBC Arena — I thought it would be wicked cool if somehow we could convince a Sabre or two to drop by the BloggerCon, with the Cup. That would have been the coolest thing ever.)

:: Another article in the News today about Niagara Falls International Airport as an air cargo hub. I would love to see this happen. It would be a beginning to a new industry in this region. I read a few weeks back about shipping from Canada becoming more important in the future, because the Port of Halifax will become a major port in itself by virtue of that most quintessential of reasons for economic development: geography. The harbor at Halifax is the deepest harbor north of Virginia, apparently. That will become important as cargo ships get bigger and bigger.

:: Sean is a fan of Lenox Tools. I’m unfamiliar with them — but I lean back in my chair, twirl my ten-in-one Klein screwdriver in my hand, and scoff at Sean’s measly six-in-one. Heh! (Kidding aside, it’s more than worth the money to buy good tools and keep them clean than to keep buying cheap tools when the old ones break or wear out. And yes, I’m becoming a tool nerd. How did that happen!)

:: Notes from the childhood: while idly surfing the Web last week, I happened upon a site devoted to an eatery my family used to occasionally visit when we lived in Portland, OR. Imagine a Chuck E. Cheese-type joint with a giant pipe organ and a guy who’d come out intermittently to play it, and you had the Organ Grinder:

There’s no easy way to describe this late, great pizzeria. The exterior resembled a spaceship owned by a clown with a fetish for custom design work. The interior recalled Hunter S. Thompson’s fever dreams of Las Vegas’ Circus Circus casino, sans high-wire wolverines.

I can’t say I remember the place terribly fondly; it was a nifty joint we went to once in a while. I always figured that was because the place was on the other side of town from where we lived, but now that I see what a bare-bones affair at Chuck E. Cheese costs, I have other suspicions as to why the Organ Grinder was never a staple of dining out for us. More regular destinations were joints called “Pizza Caboose” (railroad themed; lots of fun there) and the Sunshine Pizza Exchange, which I don’t much remember except for…nah, I don’t much remember it. I don’t even know why I remember the name.

:: What the hell is going on in Left Blogistan these days? Everyone’s talking about whether or not left-wing bloggers take orders from Markos Moulitsas or some such thing. WTF?!

:: “Erasing the Smell of Sci-Fi”:

Sean Maher, who played Simon Tam, the ship’s doctor, in both Firefly and Serenity, also once tried to dodge the sci-fi stench. He told a Scottish newspaper that “I feel like Firefly and Serenity are their own genre. It’s not science fiction so much as it’s about humanity and characters and dynamics between people.”

So, if it’s got dynamic characterizations and solid storytelling, it therefore can’t really be SF? Well, shit. I’m waisting my reading time, then.

That’s all the blogging from me today. More tomorrow.

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This Halloween, why limit your decorations to fake tombstones in the lawn, orange lights, jack o’lanterns, and plastic skeletons? Get yourself a corpse!

(No, they’re not real. I wouldn’t link something like that.)

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It seems that the Buffalo News might be looking at relaunching its Web operation, which has long been an absolute joke. Alan and BuffaloGeek both comment on this today. I say, Great — although I have to note that this potential “new Buffalo.com portal” frankly sounds a lot like Syracuse.com, which has been in existence in its current state for several years. They’ve got blogs and RSS and all that good stuff already, while the News is still operating its crappy, hard-to-navigate, not-updated-until-midmorning 1998-era website.

It is heartening, a little, to see that Margaret Sullivan’s article mentions blogs without stopping to say “Hey, there’s these new website thingamajig’s called ‘blogs’!”, which used to be the only way the News would approach Blogistan. And it’s even more heartening to see Jennifer actually quoted in a story that just treats her blog for what it is: a resource that pertains to the story in question. This, I think, is when we know that blogs have started to really become effective: when newspaper articles can cite them in a way that assumes that the readership already knows what the hell a blog is. Now that is progress.

(And while the News now apparently has clickable URLs in its online versions of articles, there’s still a lot of ineptitude there. The story that links Jen’s blog also has a sidebar, here, which can’t be accessed at all from the Web version of the article; and neither can the main article be accessed via the sidebar, if you come to the sidebar first. If you’re reading the News online exclusively, you might well never realize these two articles are meant to go together. Whoever the News is paying to do their website had better be really worried about the possibility of the News finding out just how ineptly the job has been done, lo these many years.)

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Everyone who blogs sooner or later discovers that people will arrive on our blogs through some really whacky Google searches. It’s one of the big “given” facts about Blogistan — people are looking for really weird stuff, and so doing, find us. Lots of times we’ll report on the weirdest of these searches that show up in our referrers, too, and share a hearty laugh.

But like anything, we get a bit jaded, and the longer we blog, the more prosaic the weird search-engine hits get, until it takes a truly bizarre one to make us take notice. And I had three of these just this morning!

First off, there’s our wedding pictures luther college 02. I’m sure I’ve mentioned Luther College at some point in my archives, as Luther was the big rival of my own alma mater, Wartburg College, which is why this blog ended up in those search results. But what caught my eye here is the “our wedding pictures” bit, as though the searcher assumes that Google is so all-knowing as to know who the searchers are and thus isolate their wedding pictures as opposed to some other person’s wedding pictures from Luther. It would be like me searching for “who directed my favorite movie”, and expecting to receive the answer “George Lucas”. (Actually, I’ve just tried this out just for kicks. Luckily, it doesn’t answer “George Lucas”, which would have really creeped me out.)

Then there was the really funny one: i hate jason and i hope he dies because he is a dummy and nobody likes him and he touches himself at night ewwwwww. It’s OK, Jason, whoever you are. I got your back. (And in the “it’s a small world” category, I note that while I’m the number one hit for this search, number two is Sgt. Stryker, who was a participant in Idol Tongues over at A Small Victory last season. Cool!)

And finally, we have someone who apparently is unaware of the order in which George Lucas made the Star Wars movies, because they arrived here wondering does Anakin Skywalker die in revenge of the sith. The answer, of course, is yes, he does — from a certain point of view.

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A few years ago I did a post wherein I took a lengthy Steven Den Beste post and ran it through Babelfish, translating it to Japanese and then back into English. The results were…odd, to say the least. (This was when “Shorter SDB” was all the rage.) Well, I remembered that post out of the blue a short while ago, and I figure, why not make a regular game of it for a while?

So, every once in a while I’ll take a bit of a post from a right-wing blog and translate it to Japanese and then back into English. So we’ll start with one of my favorites, John Derbyshire. (This is the guy who believes that women peak, in terms of physical attractiveness, at puberty.)

Original passage, in which Derb insists that the data still doesn’t support global warming and that what we have here are scientists propagandizing:

On the point about climate scientists misbehaving and politicking—what’s surprising? There is stuff we know for sure, where the data all points one way, and the theory has passed every observational test we can think up. There is stuff we are less sure about. There is stuff totally fuzzy—like, trying to measure the overall mean temperature of the earth to a fraction of a degree, and then repeat the measurement for the earth of 50 or 100 years ago. The data points in all directions. Naturally scientists, who are human beings, will favor the direction that suits their inclinations and preconceptions, and propagandize on that basis. If the data gets clearer, the ones proved wrong by it will fall silent, or face the ridicule of their peers. That’s how it goes when the science is real fuzzy. It doesn’t tell you anything about science at large. A water molecule is still two hydrogen atoms, one oxygen. Moving electric charges still generate magnetic fields. The earth still goes round the sun. Human beings still evolved from nonhuman predecessors. E still equals M C squared. We know these things, and lots of other things, to as high a degree of certainty as it is possible to know anything outside our own sensations. Is anthropogenic global warming going on? That we do not know.

This passage, enhanced:

The point and unexpected politicking what immoral behavior concerning the scientist of the climate which the ? ? is? The data everything points to one-way, theory being the place where it passes to all observation tests which we can think, there are raw materials where we have known because truly. We to be less are secure approximately raw materials. The raw materials completely like ambiguity, it repeats, there are times when extensive intermediate temperature of the earth is measured in one part and next 50 try the measurement for the earth of 100 years before. Datum points of all directions. The scientist who is the human naturally their inclinations and supports the direction which is suited for preconception, advertises in the foundation. If the data becomes clearer, the thing it goes down by mistake with that, it proved silently, or coldhearted of the equal person die and face. That is science goes substance is ambiguous with how. As for that being large, concerning science you do not inform with anything. The water molecule is two hydrogen atoms, 1 oxygen still. Portable electric charge generates the magnetic field still. The earth goes still around the sun. The human made develop from the predecessor who still is not the human. As for E it is a match to M C where still square it is done. As for us as for in precision having known with anything when they are our itself feelings outside possibility, you know these things and many of other thing, in the same way high. It is and continues terrestrial warming which receives the influence of the mankind? We do not know.

Yup, makes more sense to me!

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Over the years I’ve been maintaining this blog, one constant has been that I get lots of search engine hits for commentary on the poem “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe, which I wrote about way-back-when. Now, via Erin, I find a blog by another who loves this poem, who has written her own commentary on it and who has just become engaged.

Congrats to her, a complete stranger who also enjoys Poe.

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I didn’t know this, but apparently a few years ago Paramount kicked around the notion of “updating” Star Trek (The Original Series) (hereafter referenced as “TOS”), by giving the show’s visual effects the George Lucas treatment. They clearly abandoned this idea, but some prep work for the project was done as a trial-balloon by two different SFX outfits, and you can see portions of their results here and here. They’re both clips of the classic episode “The Doomsday Machine”. (I prefer the first one, myself.)

For those who aren’t geeky enough to know their classic Trek episodes by title, “The Doomsday Machine” is the one where the Enterprise happens upon the wreck of its sister ship, the Constellation, whose crew is dead except for her commanding officer, Commodore Matthew Decker, who is rambling about some kind of horrible “planet killer”. Of course, the “planet killer” turns out to be all too real: a gigantic cigar-shaped automaton that does nothing but go around destroying planets and powering itself with the remains. It’s speculated that this machine is a doomsday weapon that had been unleashed by an alien race locked in a devastating war, and that the planet killer had performed its job all too well*. The episode is one of the most memorable of TOS: I watched it on a VHS tape I checked out of the library a year or so ago, and it was still absolutely riveting, right down to that classic Trek chestnut of the transporter malfunctioning at a very inopportune moment. (For all the fun-making of William Shatner’s scenery-chewing over the years, his matter-of-fact delivery of the line “Gentlemen, I suggest you beam me aboard” is classic.)

Anyway, how do the “new” effects look? Well, it’s not as jarring as I had expected. I figured it would just look horrendously bad, but they really seem to have made an effort to stick with the basic look of TOS, and simply provide better-looking planets and some new ship movements and “camera angles” in outer space that weren’t possible back in 1967. I remember reading once that the reason the Enterprise in TOS is only ever seen from its right side (think about it, and you realize it’s true) is that the electrical wiring that powered the lights on the original model came in through the ship’s left-hand side. That’s not a concern now, obviously, so you get to see the ship from some really unusual angles. (Unusual for Trek, that is. From the standpoint of SF effects in general, none of this stuff is unusual.) You also get to see smaller effects like the Enterprise‘s tractor beam, some electrical fires still arcing on the wreck of the Constellation, and the like.

I’m kind of glad, though, that Paramount never went through with this, as it all seems a bit pointless. This stance feels a bit hypocritical for me, as I’ve never been one to complain much about the Star Wars Special Editions. But Trek TOS never really bothered me in the effects department, and it was the scripts that made the show so good, anyway. I mean, really: “Doomsday” is a great episode regardless of its effects, and other episodes — comedies like “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “A Piece of the Action”, or the stunning “City on the Edge of Forever”, which to me might just be the finest episode of a TV series ever filmed — don’t rely on effects anyway.

Now, if someone wants to re-do the effects in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, that would be fine with me.

* Extra-geeky detail: a Next Generation novel that came out in the early 90s postulated that the planet-killers were devised as a response to, those ubiquitous TNG villains, the Borg. I wasn’t wild about that idea; the planet-killer is a lot more creepy if its history is left totally unexplained, and there’s something haunting about the idea of a civilization’s sole remaining existing artifact being a horrible weapon.

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Roger Ebert has provided a handy list of links to pretty much every superhero movie review he’s ever written. I wouldn’t classify Flash Gordon as a superhero movie, but there it is.

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