It’s always impossible to judge a film by its trailer, but the trailer that aired last night on FOX for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones was a pretty amazing thing to watch. So far Lucas has given us a trailer that highlights the love story and Anakin’s movement to the Dark Side; now he gives us a trailer that highlights the story’s epic scope and the galactic-scale events that will transpire in the new film. Is it May yet???? (Actually, I’d settle for April 23, when the film’s score is to be released on CD.)

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NPR’s program Weekend Edition Sunday has begun its yearly examination of the five Oscar-nominated film scores. Check it out here.

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ABC’s Bond movie of the week last night was Live and Let Die, which is without possible question the worst of all the Bond films. Yep, I said worst. The film that I see most often cited as the worst, A View to a Kill, is nowhere near as bad as this film. Let me count the ways that Live and Let Die is horrible:

1. It’s the most sexist Bond film ever. Now, the Bond films will never be listed in Great Cinematic Hallmarks of Women’s Equality, but a nadir was reached with this one. Here we have women more blatantly manipulated as sex objects than in any other Bond flick, with Bond stacking the deck of Tarot cards for no other reason than he wants to get it on with Solitaire. The other women are portrayed as stupid and incompetent.

2. It’s the most racist Bond film ever. Yes, it was made in 1972, but so what? Casablanca was made thirty years before that, and it managed to give us a black character that wasn’t a complete caricature. This film’s blacks are either stupid or evil, and in a few cases are stupid and evil. Yaphet Kotto actually played a halfway decent villain, but every other black in the film reeks with the air of stereotype and disdain.

3. The film isn’t content to paint its women and black characters with a stereotypical brush. We also get some Southerners, the type who would later be seen in The Dukes of Hazzard. There is a writer out there, somewhere, who thought that the character of Sheriff JW Pepper was a good idea.

4. This criticism probably isn’t fair, but the film’s automobiles are all those ugly, gigantic 1970s gas-guzzlers that you now see populating junk lots. Cars in a Bond film should never be ugly.

5. Q does not appear at all in this film.

6. The film’s action sequences are dull, dull, dull. The only moment of any excitement at all is the moment when Bond escapes the alligator farm, but then we head into a speedboat chase that goes nowhere.

7. The theme song to Live and Let Die, by Paul McCartney and Wings, would actually be one of the better Bond songs if not for the ridiculous middle “funk” section (“When you got a job to do you gotta do it well….”) that sticks out like a sore thumb. The film’s music isn’t horrible, but John Barry is certainly missed.

Live and Let Die is not the film that started the trend in Bond films toward self-parody (that would be Diamonds Are Forever, Connery’s last official Bond film), but this film picked that ball up and ran with it. Roger Moore is typically blamed for this, but I’ve always wondered: to what extent is the actor to blame for deficiencies in the material to begin with? Once the self-parody trend wore off in For Your Eyes Only, Roger Moore was able to demonstrate that he could bring just as much gravity and lethal cunning to the Bond part as Connery.

Next up (I think): The Man With the Golden Gun.

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I’ve added a link to the left to a place I had totally forgotten about, though I used to frequent the place quite often: Odin’s Castle. This is a site designed to be a clearing house on the Web for other sites devoted to history, mythology, and literature. There are a lot of excellent resources here. Check it out.

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The most underrated, ignored, and generally shafted show on network television, Once and Again, again appears to have its neck on the chopping block. ABC has moved the show around its schedule for three years, and still it has a dedicated audience; however, when a show moves that much it doesn’t get a chance to develop much more than that devoted audience. It is now on Mondays, and this appears to be its last chance to generate sufficient ratings to be renewed. A website devoted to saving the show, with a link to an online petition, can be found here.

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Standard operating procedure here is for us to watch Whose Line Is It Anyway? on Thursday nights, after Friends. However, our ABC affiliate decided to air the current incarnation of Billy Graham, so for some unknown reason I watched the second half of last night’s Survivor episode. Why on earth are people still watching this stuff? To me it all looks the same: a bunch of narcissistic TV-star wannabes wandering around some godforsaken place, scrounging for water, complaining about one another, babbling into the camera about how “[Person X] isn’t doing squat to help the team/tribe/group”. They then gather for some kind of inane contest — last night’s involved eating fish that was allowed to go rancid, making me wonder if the contestants had to sign a waiver pledging not to sue CBS if they ended up with food poisoning — after which the losers head to an equally inane ritual with torches, a bonfire, and that Wonder-Bread host quizzing them about how things have gone wrong for them, how they’ll get back together as a team, et cetera. Then we get the montage of people writing names on fake parchment while dramatic music plays, and then Mr. Wonder-Bread reads the votes in an order preselected to heighten the drama, and then the ceremonial extinguishing of the torch, blah blah blah blah….I never cared for Survivor in its first incarnation, with its celebration of sneakiness and smarm in the name of “playing the game”, but at least it was something I hadn’t seen before. Now, having watched exactly one episode of the Australian version, not a single minute of the African version, and only thirty minutes of this incarnation, I can honestly say: It’s time for Survivor to go. Would the last one to leave the island please turn out the lights?

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Ah, spring in Buffalo: when fifty-five degree sunny days are followed by thirty-three degree snowy ones. But at least our summers have never, not once since they started keeping the stats, hit one hundred degrees.

The Bills signed linebacker London Fletcher from the St. Louis Rams yesterday. He replaces Sam Cowart, who went to the New York Jets. Cowart is an outstanding athlete, but he has had problems with injuries and missed all of last season after getting hurt in the first game. Ah well, take heart, Jets fans: if Cowart stays healthy, your team just picked up a hell of a linebacker.

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ER was actually decent last night, although the effort to create a kind-of Breakfast Club story using the romantically-entangled Carter, Luca, Susan and Abby was rather forced. Still, it was nice to see a different kind of storytelling on the show, one which didn’t rely on wild and gory medical traumas and the impending demise of Dr. Greene. Of course, they made clear in the preview for next week that the Greene death-watch begins in earnest next week, with the sepulchral voice over intoning “From now on….every minute matters….every patient he sees….” while Dr. Greene walks in slow-motion toward the camera. Ick.

CSI, on the other hand, was as entertaining as always with a story involving the murder of four Buddhist monks, shot in the head at point blank range while they were praying. The “third-eye” imagery of the bulletholes was a nice detail. What an excellent show — all the better because it actually shows science being done right, instead of resorting to lame pseudoscientific rubbish.

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Continuing my fascination with All Things Presidential, I am almost finished reading Front Row at the White House: My Life and Times by Helen Thomas, the dean of the White House press corps. The book is a fascinating look into the life of a White House reporter, a life which is a delicate balance of long hours, wearying travel, occasionally lousy food, coffee by the gallon, arrogant press secretaries, presidents suspicious of the press, and a front-row seat for historical events. Thomas tells her story engagingly, arranging the book around themes rather than simply delivering a sequential account of her life, which is a wise choice. It enables her to concentrate on her larger theme, the way the relationship between President and Press has changed since she arrived in the White House press corps in 1961, beginning a career which would include every administration since John F. Kennedy.

It is clear, pretty much from the outset, that she does not think that that relationship has changed for the better. She describes how she enjoyed personal, and fairly frequent, interviews with Lyndon Johnson; but as time has gone by the various press secretaries have become more involved in public relations than in the dissemination of information to the public. She relates one incident when she and Sam Donaldson attempted posing a question to President Reagan during a photo op, only to have the president glance at his top aides before replying, “I can’t answer that. They won’t let me.” Thomas and Donaldson protested that Reagan was the president, to no avail. She also takes President Clinton to task for his own cynical use of the media.

It is always fascinating to read these first-hand accounts of events in our government, and Thomas’s book is welcome in that regard.

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The West Wing had an excellent episode last night, although it was slightly marred by NBC’s ludicrous advertising leading up to it — “The First Lady drops a bombshell! Don’t miss the last five minutes!!!” Well, it wasn’t really a bombshell — just a fine character moment as the First Lady resolves a personal issue arising from her secret medication of the President, something contrary to medical ethics. The way NBC was promoting the show, I half-expected Mrs. Bartlett to reveal her secret lover or something. (Well, not really; Aaron Sorkin is a far, far better writer than that.) Anyway, it was great to see a return to what made me love the show in the first place: a character-driven show laden with intricate dialogue, self-referential jokes, and multiple storylines that demonstrated that politics can be as personal as public.

Now, if they’d just show the Emily Procter character more….say, every episode….

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