Tag: Geek Stuff

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Boldly Geeking

I wanted to highlight a few nice geek-posts I’ve seen the last week:

:: First, Jason takes note of some possible reason for optimism regarding the Star Trek relaunch by JJ Abrams:

So, here we’ve got a good look at the unfortunate vessel that’s only glimpsed in fast cuts and in between explosions during The Trailer. It’s instantly recognizable as a Federation starship with its saucer-shaped primary hull and the blue-glowing deflector dish. But wait, you might be saying if you’re familiar with the usual Star Trek vehicle architecture, there’s something screwy here: the secondary hull (that’s the bit that sports the deflector dish and the shuttlecraft hanger in the back) is on top of the ship, not below as on pretty much every other Starfleet vessel ever seen in a Star Trek TV series or movie. And there’s only one engine nacelle? Has J.J. Abrams gone insane? Is this the sign we’ve all been looking for, the proof that he’s abandoned all the established Trek lore and is waving his private parts at the existing fanbase? (Can you tell I’ve been hanging out on the fanboy message boards again?)

Well, no… in fact, I take the Kelvin‘s layout as a very positive sign of exactly the opposite. But you’ve probably got to be a real old-timer like me to recognize the clues. You see, the Kelvin is highly reminiscent of the very earliest design sketches for the good old Enterprise herself, which were upside-down relative to the way we’re familiar with her looking. You can see one of these sketches on this page (scroll down to the section labeled “Artwork”), and several more in the old book The Making of Star Trek, if you can track down a copy of that. I think they were reprinted in the excellent book Inside Star Trek, as well (for my money, that one is the best volume ever written on the history of the original series).

As for the single-engine controversy, it’s more-or-less understood nowadays that in the Trek ‘verse, you need to have two nacelles, but that wasn’t always the case. Way back in the ’70s, even before Star Trek: The Motion Picture — the Golden Age of original series fandom, in my opinion — one of the primary sources for young nerds was a book called The Star Fleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph. This volume was considered official “canon” for years until Gene Roddenberry decided it wasn’t, and as I recall, it contained several one-nacelle ship designs.

Ah, the Star Fleet Technical Manual…I really should track down a copy of that book one of these years. It was a lot of fun to dig through, back when I was a kid. I never owned it, but one of the libraries we used to frequent had a copy in its collection. I remember looking at the lists of all the ships in Starfleet, and also noting the interesting designs of the ships as well. Sometimes the warp nacelles were on top of the ship, sometimes underneath; some ships had only one nacelle with no secondary hull, and so on. The USS Reliant from The Wrath of Khan was a nice throwback to these other formulations of Starfleet ships, and Jason’s right to note that at least in this aspect of his visual design, Abrams is taking his cues from established Trek history.

Of course, this was never in much doubt. Abrams has always been good at injecting his projects with lots of small details for the segments of fandom that live for the small stuff. Witness all the people who devote time to digging through the inner details of LOST, and similar factors were at play in Alias. I’m not worried about that aspect of this project; I remain worried that Abrams is going to screw up the character dynamic of Trek.

Second, SamuraiFrog decides that he’s a Star Wars fan after all:

Recently, Becca and I sat in front of our new, big widescreen TV and watched, in a single day, all six Star Wars films, from The Phantom Menace to Return of the Jedi. And it turns out I’m still a Star Wars fan. It was hard to be one for the last decade plus of humorless Star Wars fandom whining its overly entitled little head off about the thing it professes to love but openly hates (and, like an abused housewife, keeps returning to because no one understands it in that special way that they do). But I still dig it, and watching all six parts at once makes for a more unified experience than I thought it would. It all makes sense, and it all holds together. And it’s surprisingly easy to get emotionally involved.

I still haven’t watched the complete Star Wars saga in one go, although a few times in college we watched all three of the Original Trilogy at once. My constant hope that the backlash against Star Wars eventually fades continues to hold sway in my mind.

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Et tu….

Via Jason, I learn who I would be if I was an action hero (sorry about the formatting, but it’s one of those things where you copy-and-paste the HTML code they give you, and I don’t feel like fixing it manually):

You Scored as Maximus

After his family was murdered by the evil emperor Commodus, the great Roman general Maximus went into hiding to avoid Commodus’s assassins. He became a gladiator, hoping to dominate the colosseum in order to one day get the chance of killing Commodus. Maximus is valiant, courageous, and dedicated. He wants nothing more than the chance to avenge his family, but his temper often gets the better of him.

Maximus

79%

The Amazing Spider-Man

75%

Indiana Jones

67%

Lara Croft

63%

Neo, the “One”

63%

Batman, the Dark Knight

63%

William Wallace

58%

Captain Jack Sparrow

58%

James Bond, Agent 007

54%

The Terminator

54%

El Zorro

50%

Huh. I wouldn’t have guessed him, but OK, I guess.

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“If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake, you’ll be facing me, and you’ll be armed.”


A few months back I finally addressed a monstrously huge hole in my science fiction, space opera loving resume: I watched all of Firefly, every bit of it, including the movie Serenity. I realize I’m very much late to the game on this, but hey, late to the game still means I’m a player. Or something like that.

Firefly, for those who haven’t paid attention, is a show that Joss Whedon created back in 2002, after Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended. It’s an SF show set something like five hundred years in the future where humanity has colonized a distant star system that consists of, well, lots of planets and whole ton of moons that have been terraformed for human colonization. The “Core Worlds” are the rich and powerful planets of the system, and these worlds form the basis of “the Alliance”, which is the somewhat despotic government. The outlying worlds and moons are a mix of independent planets and moons and some dependent on the Alliance. The show takes place several years after the end of a civil war in which the “Independents” fought unsuccessfully against the encroaching Alliance; the spaceship that serves as the main location of the show, Serenity, is a Firefly-class freighter named for the deciding battle in the war, Serenity Valley, in which our lead character, Captain Malcolm Reynolds, fought on the side of the Independents. Got all that? (Yes, it’s weird that the show is titled for the class of ship rather than the title ship itself. By that logic, Star Trek should have been titled Constitution, because the Enterprise is a Constitution-class vessel.)

So, when the show starts, Reynolds (often called “Mal” for short) is commanding his beat up old ship with its small crew as they go from job to job to pay their way, with many of these jobs being of the less-than-legal sort. This can mean smuggling illegal goods from one world to another, or salvaging valuable cargo from spacewrecked ships, or stealing valuable medicines from Alliance hospitals for sale on the challenged outer worlds. This also leads Mal and company into the employ and/or business association with all manner of unsavory characters, some of whom are very dangerous people indeed.

In looking about online for commentary about the show, much has been made about the show’s atmosphere. I’ve often heard Star Wars described (at least A New Hope, not so much the rest of the series) as a Western set in space, but I’ve frankly never seen that as being a fair or accurate label. In the case of Firefly, it’s entirely accurate, not only in the fact that everyone dresses like they’re in a Western, Mal’s preferred weapon is a six-shooter, everyone talks in that Western way (you’ll know what I mean if you see the show), everyone dresses in a Western way (long coats, wide-brimmed hats, lots of facial hair all over the place), the main mode of transportation on many of the poor worlds the show visits is the horse, and many of the settlements on those worlds are exactly the kinds of dusty towns you’d see in any Western. This appears to be a problem for some viewers, but it never really bugged me all that much. I would have liked to have seen a little more variety in the kinds of settings on the show, but I there was some of that, after all (one world has rich people living in floating cities that hover above an ocean), and lodging such complaints about a show that was only around for fourteen episodes and a movie seems a bit churlish. The obvious rejoinder from Whedon and company is, “Yeah, yeah, we’d have got round to that if Fox hadn’t canceled us after jerking us around for half a season.”

OK, as to that last: FOX’s shabby treatment of certain shows and not others is something of infamous legend in teevee fandom circles, but FOX’s record in the case of Firefly is particularly bad. About the only thing they could have done to show less confidence in the show and to guarantee its eventual demise would have been to simply not have greenlighted it in the first place. FOX execs weren’t overly enthusiastic about the show’s two-hour pilot episode (which in itself is astonishing, as that pilot could have been transposed to the movie screen as-is for one hell of a SF movie), so they ordered the pilot shelved and another hastily shot, which is why the show’s second episode, “The Train Job”, was aired first. Then FOX continued to air the episodes in whatever screwy order they felt like airing them in, which in turn screwed the show because, while it wasn’t exactly a serial, Whedon and company were creating quite a bit of continuity with recurring characters and storylines. The wonderful pilot episode wasn’t aired until the show’s fate was already sealed, and the show’s timeslot was a disaster: FOX took a show that was heavy with continuity and in a genre that traditionally has to struggle to gain an audience and put it on Friday nights at 9:00. Now, maybe FOX was thinking back to the earlier days of the network when they had The X-Files in that timeslot and they kept it there since they didn’t have much of anything else to air anyplace, but those days were long gone by the time Firefly came along. (Remember, NBC in the 60s was able to finally drive the final nails into Star Trek‘s coffin by giving it a Friday time slot.) In any case, FOX’s treatment of Firefly makes ABC’s treatment of Once and Again look like the very picture of network support. Again, I think of Jon Lovitz’s bitter quip to David Letterman some years ago when FOX canceled his own critically-loved but ratings-challenged show The Critic: “FOX? They should spell it with a ‘U’.”

But back to the show. One claim I’ve heard is that lots of fans find Malcolm Reynolds compelling because he’s what Han Solo might have been if he hadn’t been “softened” in Return of the Jedi. I don’t see that, actually. First, I never thought Solo was “softened” at all. But what happened is that Reynolds’s character arc is pretty much Han Solo’s character arc in reverse.

When we first meet Han Solo, he’s a pirate and a smuggler, making his living by using his ship to transport the goods belonging to one criminal low-life or another. In fact, when we meet him, he’s just earned himself the anger of one of his “clients” because he’s lost cargo belonging to one of his criminal bosses. But as the Star Wars story progresses, Solo falls in with the Rebellion, hangs with them for a while, and while aching to return to his former life, eventually finds himself converting to their cause and becoming a true believer. The cynical criminal becomes an idealist. Mal Reynolds, however, started out as the idealist hero, fighting a losing fight with the side he believes in. (When an Alliance officer questions him about it, saying “You fought on the wrong side”, Mal replies, “I fought on the losing side. I’m still not convinced it was the wrong side.”) The opening scenes of the pilot show the last moments of the Battle of Serenity Valley, when Mal believes that his side in on the verge of victory, just as soon as his air support arrives – when word comes that his commanders have decided to throw in the towel and those fighting are ordered to lay down arms. Just like that, Mal’s cause is defeated, and he becomes bitter and cynical. Han Solo is the criminal who finds something to believe in and fight for; Mal Reynolds loses the thing he had to believe in and fight for, and thus becomes a criminal.

(Now, when I say that Mal Reynolds is a “criminal”, I’m saying that some of what he does is illegal. He’s not afraid of doing things that are illegal, but he’s not at heart a criminal in the sense that he lives to break the law. Robin Hood and Ernst Stavro Blofeld are both “criminals”, if you take my meaning.)

This all changes a bit in the feature film Serenity that somehow managed to get made after the show’s cancellation; the major theme of the film is everyone around Mal trying to figure out what, if anything, he actually believes. The film gives us an answer, but it’s not an easy answer at all, and Mal’s actions in the film are as consistent with one set of beliefs (that someone must stand up to the Alliance) as with another (that Mal’s days as a fighter-for-something are over, and all he wants now is freedom).

But anyway. Firefly has become as beloved in SF fandom as anything I can remember, and it’s truly a bummer to note that the lackluster box office of the follow-up Serenity movie likely means that we’re unlikely to ever see another Firefly show or movie again. There have been a few comics series taking the story further, and that to me is probably the best format we can expect for continued Firefly goodness (if not actual novels; I’d read original Firefly novels if they existed). So, for the time being, what we’ve got is what we’ve got. That being the case, Firefly as it stands is a surprisingly complete body of work.

In just fourteen episodes, Firefly creates an SF universe that feels plausible and real, populates it with characters we can know and care about, and tells involving stories using all that in the mix. Watching the show’s episodes in the correct order, via the DVD set, I noticed how fully-imagined the show was right from the beginning. Firefly stands in marked contrast to any of the Star Trek series, each of which required a season or two to really settle into a rhythm. The characters’ voices are all established from the first moments, which is something you don’t often see. Thus, there’s nothing in Firefly that reminds people of, say, Mr. Spock in the early episodes of Star Trek emoting all over the place since it hadn’t yet been decided that Vulcans suppress their emotions. This is a show that really learned the lessons of Star Wars in that it made all its technology look like it does something. I particularly appreciated the episode “Out of Gas”, where Serenity is crippled by the failure of an engine part that’s about the size of a can of coffee. That may have struck some as implausibly, but being a maintenance worker myself (but not quite up to the level of a Keylee or a Montgomery Scott), I’ve seen lots of big machines felled by comparatively tiny parts. Remember: the space shuttle Challenger was doomed by a piece of rubber that wasn’t even part of the ship itself, and the Apollo 13 mission was nearly destroyed by a faulty wire.

Also of interest was the show’s approach to establishing its universe. Lots of SF shows, like the Star Treks, insist on showing us one new world after another, and only start to use recurring characters when the show is established. (DS9, by virtue of its stationary setting, broke this habit, much to its credit; I still hold it as the best post-TOS incarnation of Trek.) Firefly, however, gives us recurring characters right off the bat: con-woman Saffron, criminal boss Niska, low-grade but ambitious hood Badger. This is more evidence of how well-designed the show was, and another reason to be annoyed at the show’s ultimate failure.

In terms of casting, Firefly was, as far as I can tell, perfectly cast, at least in its leads. Everybody seems to not be playing their roles so much as inhabiting them, and the chemistry amongst this crew is established very early on. Other touches are equally pleasant: the swearing in Chinese (and the constant hints that China became the dominant culture of Earth before the diaspora), and it only took a few hearings before my ears accepted the word “Goram” as a surrogate for “goddamn”. Fictional expletives are always tricky (“Felgercarb!” being a notable example, from BSG), and using Chinese and one made-up English one is a nifty way to solve that particular problem.

Was Firefly perfect? Of course not, but its general level of quality was astonishing for a show that never had the full backing of its network. What might have been! I can’t believe that we’ve seen the last of this crew or heard the last of their stories. It’s too promising a world, and its existing canon is too high-quality to languish forever. Or so I can hope.

(Image above via.)

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To Boldly Geek

The official first trailer for JJ Abrams’s Star Trek reboot is out. Having watched it, I can say once again regarding this project: Meh. I’m still not sold on the idea of rebooting Trek in the first place (If we’ve gotta have Trek, surely we can tell lots of new stories without tossing aside established continuity, and why do we even gotta have Trek in the first place? It’s a wide wonderful SF world out there, let’s go see some uncharted planets!), and as far as this particular project goes, I’m still less than enthusiastic. Here’s the trailer:

It’s a nice looking trailer, especially the space battle stuff, although I do pine for the days when every Trek tale on the big screen didn’t need to have the Big E out there, phasers and photon torpedoes a-blastin’ away. I’m more concerned with the character stuff. The trailer alternates a bit between Kirk and Spock, first showing a Kirk who’s apparently a hothead kid who is constantly flouting the rules. Then we see that Spock’s main trouble is the fact that he’s half-human and half-Vulcan.

As to the latter, well, duh, and frankly, after the entire run of the Original Series and six feature films with the original cast, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of more interesting comment to be made about this. Yeah, Spock is the product of two worlds, and not entirely comfortable in either. If Abrams really reboots everything, resetting the entire Trek continuity to zero (as some rumors have him doing), then the entire arc of Spock’s life as a character is gone too, and that bugs me a bit. In the last two “Original Cast” Trek movies, we get to see a Spock who finally figured out his place in both of his native cultures, and the character didn’t suffer for the lack of all that angst. Maybe this can be handled interestingly, but I fear that it will seem like a trip into familiar territory.

And then there’s the former, James T. Kirk. The popular concept of this character is that he’s a womanizing rule-breaker, but I’ve always thought that the rule-breaking idea of him is overdone a bit. Kirk is a man who takes rules seriously at times, sidesteps them at others, but he’s a guy with a fearsomely strong moral compass. I’m worried that Abrams’s movie will defuse this a bit, turning Kirk into the archetypal hothead who learns to tamp it down a little. I saw somewhere online the analogy that the trailer looks like “Top Gun in space”, and that’s not off the mark. In truth, I hated the Kirk-as-a-kid-driving-the-hotrod bit. How does that square with the notion, established in the original series, that Kirk as a young man was incredibly straight-laced, so much so that his best friend (and future first officer) Gary Mitchell would describe Academy Cadet Kirk as “a stack of books with legs”, or that one particularly gleeful troublemaker named Finnegan would decide that Kirk was such a stick-in-the-mud that he made Kirk the butt of all of his jokes? What was always so interesting to me about James T. Kirk was that underneath the veneer of a handsome young man who had an eye for the ladies, who had the bright smile and the twinkle in his eye, and who would always err on the side of what he thought was right even if the regulations said something different, one could find beating the heart of a very serious man. A man who took duty extremely seriously. The trailer doesn’t really suggest that’s what Abrams is doing with Kirk, and that potentially bothers me.

(Now, of course, we are just talking about a trailer here, and trailers are notorious for not accurately showing what movies are really like. Maybe Abrams has a very serious Kirk indeed, but it’s hard to square that with Kirk engaging in life-threatening stunts like driving a car to the brink of a cliff, and it doesn’t help the impression I have of Abrams’s Kirk that every production still that’s been released so far has Abrams’s Kirk making a very smug facial expression.)

Finally: where the Hell is Dr. McCoy in this trailer?! I think I got a glimpse or two of him, but that’s about it. And if that’s any indication of the role McCoy plays in Abrams’s reboot, then he can have his reboot and I’ll keep my eight bucks next summer when this comes out. The key dynamic that made the Original Cast work so well wasn’t the chemistry between Kirk and Spock, but the triple-chemistry between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. These three men have an extremely deep friendship that survived Edith Keeler, an extremely deep friendship that compelled two of them to set aside their entire lives to go after the one they thought dead but still in need. Dr. McCoy is every bit as important in Original Cast Trek as Kirk and Spock. If Abrams moves him into the background at all, making him more along the lines of Scotty and Uhura and the rest, I’ll be irritated.

Again, I’m basing this all on a two-minute trailer, so maybe I’ll end up full of bird poop on all this. That would be fine with me, but to the extent that past performance indicates future results on stuff like this, I’m still not enthused, because I’ve just never found the JJ Abrams Kool-aid to be my cup of tea. Alias was mildly entertaining, but it never grabbed hold of me, and for my money, LOST is just a bunch of people brooding on an island. I’m certainly not thrilled about a state of affairs where Firefly is dead outside of comics but we’re getting JJ Abrams’s take on Star Trek.

We’ll see.

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Love and Death, or, What Movies Are For!

Back a few months ago Entertainment Weekly had themselves a big old list-fest, in which they compiled a bunch of lists of pop-culture stuff. At the time I commented on their teevee shows, and the movies and books lists. They did a whole bunch of these, but there are two lists I wanted to comment on at the time, and hey, I can still comment on them.

First up, they did a list of Romantic Gestures of the Last 25 Years. Here’s that list, with some comment:

The spectral Patrick Swayze lifts a coin across the room for Demi Moore in Ghost (1990).

I haven’t seen this movie in a long, long time, but I really liked it back in the day. I wonder how it’s aged? I think that the movie got taken a little more seriously than it should have; I found it a perfectly nice piece of supernatural melodrama. This was a good moment in the movie.

:: Robert Redford washes Meryl Streep’s hair in Out of Africa (1985).

I haven’t seen this movie, even though I have a copy floating around here somewhere.

:: John Cusack blasts Peter Gabriel outside Ione Skye’s window in 1989’s Say Anything…

This image has become pretty iconic, hasn’t it? My adoration of this movie is long established, but it’s still, for me, one of the most romantic love stories ever made. I love how chivalrous Lloyd Dobler is, how it’s not just something he does because it’s the way the script is written but because the script knows that this is hard-wired into his very being. For me, though, the most romantic part of the film comes when Diane Court comes back to Lloyd after the breakup and tells him that she needs him. He asks if she really needs him or just someone, and before she can answer, he just says “It doesn’t matter” and takes her back anyway.

:: Heath Ledger finds and keeps the shirts Jake Gyllenhaal had saved from their first trip to Brokeback Mountain (2005).

I haven’t seen the movie, but the short story is all kinds of brilliant – however many years of searing emotional life captured in less than thirty pages.

:: The beauty (Molly Ringwald) gives the rebel (Judd Nelson) her earring in The Breakfast Club (1985).

Yeah, sure. But I’ve always had mixed feelings about the way Andrew (Emilio Estevez) comes to his attraction to Ally Sheedy. I’d have preferred it if somehow they could have had him attracted to her “goth” side, as opposed to the makeover that, however cute, isn’t her. Does anybody think that she’s going to maintain that look on Monday morning when she’s back at school?

:: Leonardo DiCaprio draws Kate Winslet in the nude in Titanic (1997).

Oh, heavens, yes. I know we’re all supposed to hate this movie now, but this is just one beautifully executed moment. DiCaprio is so good in this scene (the whole movie, really): he starts out easily enough, since he’s drawn lots of nudes; but then he becomes terribly nervous when it’s the girl he loves nude before him. And then he shifts again, once he manages to focus his attention on the task at hand: capturing her in pencil strokes. Plus, the scene has the movie’s musical highlight: the solo piano version of “My Heart Will Go On”, played without a lot of lame embellishment by James Horner himself.

(By the way, when Lovejoy comes into the stateroom to see if Rose is there and behaving herself, why didn’t Jack just hide in a closet while Rose sat in a chair pretending to read a book or something? That might have been more productive than leading Lovejoy on a chase through the ship. And when they decide that they have to tell everyone about the iceberg, why did Jack have to go along? I know, so he could be there for Lovejoy to plant the diamond in his pocket, but that’s the point in the movie where I can always feel the Heavy Hand of Plot pushing us along.)

:: Ewan McGregor breaks into ”Your Song” while wooing Nicole Kidman in 2001’s Moulin Rouge (2001).

:: Larenz Tate offers an impromptu beat poem to Nia Long in Love Jones (1997).

:: Amélie (Audrey Tautou) setting up a wild goose chase for her beloved Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz) all through Paris in Amélie (2001).

Haven’t seen these.

:: Glen Hansard buys Marketa Irglova a piano before he leaves to find his other true love in London in Once (2007).

I hadn’t seen this before I saw the movie, but now I have, and I must say: this is a wonderful moment, but the really incandescent moment in this movie is much earlier, when they’ve just met and play an impromptu duet in a music store.

:: Julie Delpy sings a song (”Waltz”) she wrote about him to Ethan Hawke right Before Sunset (2004).

A good moment. I should watch these movies again soon. I wonder if they’ll ever revisit these characters again?

:: Zhang Ziyi leaps into the clouds for her true love at the end of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).

I really need to see this all the way through.

:: Richard Gere climbs up the fire escape to Julia Roberts’ window in Pretty Woman (1990).

Hmmmm. It’s a pretty corny end to a pretty corny movie. A fun movie, sure, but one of the best romantic moments of the last twenty-five years of movies? I dunno.

:: After her beloved Pedro (Marco Leonardi) dies making love to her in Like Water for Chocolate, Tita (Lumi Cavazos) eats matches, literally igniting her inner flame and burning her whole ranch to the ground.

Yes. Another movie I should watch again.

:: Ellen Page as Juno (2007) leaves orange Tic-Tacs in Michael Cera’s mailbox to make up with him.

You know what? The names of these characters are so perfect for the characters themselves. “Juno” is a perfect name for a girl who’s something of an outsider but who’s content to be that; and “Bleeker” is a perfect last name for the gangly kid who somehow blunders into losing his virginity with a girl named Juno.

:: Joey Lauren Adams buys Ben Affleck a painting in a diner in Chasing Amy (1997).

Note to self: watch Kevin Smith’s movies.

:: Steve Carell, i.e., The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), sells his toys on eBay to build his life with Katherine Keener.

I was surprised how sympathetic this movie was to its characters. It didn’t go the cheap and easy route of making us laugh at the Steve Carell character; nor did it require him to completely change his life to be with the woman he falls for. He makes some changes, but he doesn’t alter everything. (Plus, the Bollywood-style ending cracks me up more than anything else in the movie.)

:: The Beast gives his library to Belle in Beauty and the Beast (1991).

I’d go earlier, actually: when he manages to set aside anger to say “You’re welcome” when she thanks him for saving her life. But then, I tend to find romance in the very small moments when the seed of love is planted, rather than in the big gestures that show it in full flower.

:: Billy Crystal hunts down Meg Ryan on New Year’s Eve in When Harry Met Sally (1989).

Well, duh. I’ve always wondered, by the way, if the original script had the bit about “I love the little crinkle you get above your nose when you’re looking at me like I’m nuts”. If so, did they have to look at actresses on the basis of whether or not they had that little crinkle above their nose? Or did Billy Crystal notice that while filming and throw that in there?

:: Daniel-Day Lewis unbuttons Michelle Pfeiffer’s glove in The Age of Innocence (1993).

I don’t really remember this moment, since it’s well over ten years since I saw this movie.

:: Adam Sandler and Billy Idol serenade Drew Barrymore on a plane in The Wedding Singer (1998).

Didn’t see this. I’ve heard good things about it, so maybe I should. I never liked Adam Sandler until Spanglish, in which I liked him very much (even though I didn’t like the movie itself).

:: Ralph Fiennes carries Kristen Scott Thomas out of the cave in The English Patient (1996).

I think I owe this movie a reappraisal since I read the book and found it amazing.

:: Colin Firth buys Renée Zellweger a new diary at the end of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001).

:: Campbell Scott gives Kyra Sedgwick a garage door opener in Singles (1992).

:: As his fascist punk pals look on, Daniel Day-Lewis secretly licks the ear of his Pakistani lover (Gordan Warnecke) in 1985’s My Beautiful Laundrette.

I haven’t seen these. But hey, here are some moments I find pretty iconically [that’s not so much an actual word -Ed.] romantic from the last twenty-five years:

:: Ashitaka carries a wounded San out of Iron Town in Princess Mononoke.

:: James Bond holds a terrified Vesper in the shower in Casino Royale.

:: Jude sings “I’ve Just Seen a Face” in the bowling alley in Across the Universe.

:: John Book (Harrison Ford) teaches Rachel Lapp to dance to “Wonderful World” in Witness. The last shot of this scene, after Eli takes Rachel away, has Book dropping his sweat-covered brow to his shirt sleeve in a gesture of physical heat and embarrased realization that he’s done something he probably shouldn’t have. This remains Harrison Ford’s finest achievement as an actor.

:: President Andrew Shepard tries to send Sydney Ellen Wade a bouquet of flowers in The American President.

:: Will Turner literally gives his heart to Elizabeth in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. (I liked At World’s End a great deal, and never found it a “mess”.)

:: Thinking death is soon to come, Samwise Gamgee remembers Rosie Cotton and the flowers in her hair in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

:: Young Anakin Skywalker asks the girl who’s just walked into his master’s shop if she’s an angel.

OK, those are the romantic scenes. Now let’s tackle EW‘s list of Great Death Scenes:

:: Steve Buscemi + a woodchipper + the pure white snow of 1996’s Fargo = arguably the most hilarious ooky death on film.

Well, sure! Nobody looks at woodchippers the same way since this movie came out. But was anybody else surprised that it apparently takes a good deal of effort to get a body through a woodchipper? I heard that this movie had a “putting a guy through a woodchipper” scene before I saw it, and I kind of figured it would be over in seconds; guy goes in, bloody goo flies out the other side.

:: The T-1000 pulls a Wicked Witch of the West (via a vat of molten metal) at the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

Yup, that’s a good villain demise, right there.

:: Bill Murray throws a toaster in the tub, steps in front of a moving truck, and swan dives off a bell tower in Groundhog Day (1993).

Gods, if only they’d cast someone other than Andie MacDowell in this movie! I’ve always found something very off-putting about her.

:: The heroines of 1991’s Thelma and Louise drive over the edge of the Grand Canyon.

Roger Ebert made the case that the way this scene is edited hurts the film by fading to credits too quickly. I tend to agree.

:: Mel Gibson, sans intestines, bellows ”Freeeeedommmmmm!” in Braveheart (1995).

Well, that happens a minute or so before he dies, really. His actual death has him seeing his beloved Murron wandering through the crowd, holding his gaze, while the axe descends toward his neck.

Al Pacino’s Scarface (1983) introduces seemingly half of Miami to his ”leetle friend” before getting a bullet in the back of the brain.

I haven’t seen this and have little intention to do so, since mob stories aren’t my cup of tea, and I’ve heard this movie described either as brilliant or a giant turd with nothing in between.

:: Samuel L. Jackson is speechifying to the rest of the cast of 1999’s Deep Blue Sea about survival when a super-shark leaps out of the water and — CHOMP! — no more Samuel L. Jackson.

This is the only good thing about this movie. The rest of it’s a forgettable exercise in gore. OK if you like gore, I suppose. I’m not opposed to gore, but that’s this movie’s entire purpose. It’s like going to an ice cream parlor and being told, “We’re out of ice cream so here’s a bowl of hot fudge.” Ewwwww.

:: Bruce Davison gently coaxes his AIDS-stricken lover to ”let go” in Longtime Companion (1990).

Haven’t seen this.

:: Chris Sarandon uses The Machine to suck 50 years of Cary Elwes’ life away in 1987’s The Princess Bride.

OK, that’s a decent scene. But we’re talking death scenes here, not mostly death scenes. So I disqualify it on that basis. We’re looking for all dead, not mostly dead.

:: Gollum follows the Ring of Power right into the scorching depths of Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).

Watch the movie again, EW! Gollum doesn’t follow the Ring, he precedes it. I’ve always been of two minds on this scene, anyway, as Peter Jackson filmed it. I don’t mind Frodo coming back at Gollum for one final attempt to get the Ring, but what makes it so amazing in the book is that what happens is that Gollum is so ecstatic about regaining The Precious that he completely loses perspective and doesn’t realize he’s gone right over the edge. I’d have preferred the movie to retain that aspect of things by maybe having Gollum holding the Ring, grinning, preparing to slip it on his finger – and only then realizing that he’s about to land in the pool of lava.

:: Warring exes Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner fall to their doom on a chandelier in 1989’s The War of the Roses.

OK, I guess.

:: A human sacrifice watches his own heart get ripped from his chest in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984).

OK, again, it’s not a “death scene” if the guy isn’t dead after the thing happens that we’re talking about. It’s the lowering into the lava that does him in. Mola Ram’s death scene is a nice villain death, but there’s a subtlety there that’s often missed: if you listen to the sound in the film closely, every time someone is awakened from the Black Sleep of Kali by fire there’s a very specific “burning hiss” sound. This sound is heard when Mola Ram tries to grab onto the glowing Sankara Stone just before it drops to the river, implying that at that moment Mola Ram awakens from his own Black Sleep, realizes what he’s been doing…and then plummets to the hungry crocodiles. But anyway….

:: Darth Vader, after defying the Emperor and saving Luke Skywalker’s life, decides he wants to see his son’s face with his own eyes at the climactic end of Return of the Jedi (1983).

Oh, absolutely. And John Williams does something typically brilliant by having a single harp plucking out the Imperial March as Vader expires.

:: Scar (Jeremy Irons) tosses Mufasa (James Earl Jones) into a wildebeest stampede in his quest to become The Lion King (1994).

I’m not as big a fan of this movie as some, but this is one amazing moment. There’s always someone evil in Disney movies, but this is really evil.

:: Jennifer Jason Leigh is quite literally pulled apart by two semi-trucks at the end of 1986’s The Hitcher.

Haven’t seen this. Doesn’t sound like my thing, either.

:: With his dying breath in L.A. Confidential (1997), Kevin Spacey speaks two words to his killer — ”Rolo Tomasi.”

I liked this movie a lot. I don’t recall the exact details of Spacey’s demise, but good movie.

:: Will Ferrell crosses Dr. Evil, gets very badly burned, shot, and then shot again — all off camera — in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997).

Heh.

:: Jack telling Rose not to say her goodbyes before freezing to death in Titanic (1997).

Wow, are there a lot of well-done deaths in this movie! I always liked how we don’t see Jack die; we see him talking, and next time we see him, he’s gone. Plus, the other deaths on the ship: the old couple cuddling in bed for the last time, the last bedtime story for the children, Captain Smith alone on the bridge. Why do we all have to hate this movie, again?

:: First, Emil (Paul McCrane), is doused with a horrifically disfiguring batch of toxic waste. Then he’s literally liquidated by his boss’s car in 1997’s RoboCop. Bad day.

Yup, that was a great moment.

:: Lucy Liu losing her head to Uma Thurman’s blade in Kill Bill Vol. One (2003).
:: The Bride killing Bill at the end of Kill Bill Vol. Two (2004).

I haven’t seen Kill Bill yet.

:: Martin Sheen going splat! after getting tossed off a roof in The Departed (2006).

Again, a movie I’m not likely to see.

:: Cedric Diggory dying by Voldemort’s wand in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005).

Well, I don’t know about this one. Half-Blood Prince is likely to outdo this particular death, I think.

:: Dan Hedaya stubbornly refuses to die in Blood Simple (1984).

:: An underwear clad Paige (Paris Hilton) is chased through a factory warehouse and eventually killed by a wooden spear thrown through her forehead in 2005’s House of Wax.

I haven’t seen either of these.

So what would I add?

:: The Apollo 1 fire at the beginning of Apollo 13. All you really see is one astronaut’s hand, desperately pounding at the hatch that can’t open.

:: Michael Ironside gets his arms pulled off in Total Recall. This is one of my favorite “gross-out” bad guy deaths ever in a movie.

:: They don’t count because they’re only “near death” scenes, but two amazing acts of self-sacrifice in The Abyss: Lindsey (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) allows herself to drown so Briggman can swim her back to the Deep Core, and later on, Briggman goes on a one-way journey to defuse the nuke dropped to the bottom of the deepest trench on Earth. I love The Abyss.

:: Aragorn declares the honor of the Dead restored in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and the thousands of dead warriors finally pass to the death that has been denied them for a thousand years.

:: Dr. Whatsisname, the guy whose research on the arm left behind by the original Terminator would lead to Skynet, sacrifices his own life to save John and Sarah Connor.

:: Harry (Bruce Willis) in Armageddon detonates a nuclear bomb manually to destroy the asteroid threatening Earth; not to be outdone, an entire space shuttle full of astronauts do exactly the same thing in Deep Impact, one of them noting “Hey, look at the bright side. We’ll all have junior high schools named after us.” (One of my greatest weaknesses as a human being is that even though I know Armageddon is total crap, I can’t not watch the thing when it’s on. A few weeks ago it came on one of the local sports-free channels at the same time as a Bills game in which the Bills were playing badly. I kept clicking back to Armageddon, but hey, bad SF is always better than bad football.)

So, what love and death scenes to you all like?

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The Great Bird

It appears that we now know what the Enterprise will look like when Star Trek reboots next year:

Well…I don’t know. I can’t decide yet if I like it or not. It certainly sticks to the classic shape, and the primary hull (the saucer section) looks fine, but the secondary hull (the engineering section) looks too small, squashed even, and the warp nacelles don’t look right to me at all, being too far forward (like you could step off the primary hull and step down onto the nacelles) and sporting that oddly-shaped flare at the front. Plus, the pylons connecting the warp nacelles to the secondary hull are bowed outward, making the ship look bow-legged. I do like the sleeker, wider pylon connecting the primary and secondary hulls, and the deflector dish looks nifty, too. From the presence of shuttlecraft in the picture and the fact that the fronts of the nacelles are dark, I assume this pic is from the ship in a drydock situation. I wonder what color the fronts of the nacelles will be once the ship is flying.

I don’t hate it, but it ain’t this, either:

We’ll see. It took me a long time of watching ST:TNG before I got really used to the Enterprise-D, which I always thought looked awesome from some angles and ridiculous from others. The Enterprise-E looked okay, although I haven’t seen the movies it appeared in enough to have a strong opinion.

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Choose your next witticism carefully….

While I was on blogcation, a number of times I found things online or off that tempted me greatly to return to active posting before my arbitrarily-chosen return point of Election Night. Many of these things were political in nature, so I’m glad I didn’t post about them, but more than a few weren’t, and one blog in particular that I happened upon shortly after I went on hiatus (and before I’d decided that I’d likely return on Election Night) was one that just killed me to not be able to link. Well, now I’m back, so here it is:

I Expect You To Die!

On this blog, a person named Snell has been methodically reviewing each and every James Bond film leading up to this week’s American release of Quantum of Solace. His takes on the films aren’t identical with mine, but they line up in a lot of key ways, and his reviews make for extremely entertaining reading. I’ve had a grand time following this blog the last couple of months, and it bums me out that I can only share it now that its purpose is nearly done. But hey, archives are like diamonds: they’re forever! So go look. If you enjoy James Bond at all, check this one out.

I Expect You To Die!

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Some Thoughts on Contemporary Popular Culture

That’s actually a pretentious title for a post in which I’m going to geek out a bit. Huzzah! Back to the geekiness!

:: It did excite me that another attempt to bring everyone’s favorite Cimmerian, Conan the Barbarian, back to the big screen was in the offing. That excitement became past tense, however, when the big name most likely on board to direct turned out to be Brett Ratner, who has made a nice living out of making dull movies.

:: I’m actually enjoying Grey’s Anatomy this season, although I still think the show desperately needs another character or two. They’ve already added one — the new emergency medicine chief, who’s also an Iraq war vet with a penchant for maverick thinking — but another, cardiologist Dr. Erica Hahn, is about to depart, so that’s a wash. But the show’s generally been more interesting this year, what with backing off the constant fluctuations of the Meredith-and-Derek romance a bit, in favor of other characters. And Izzy Stevens hasn’t even gotten on my nerves yet, strangely enough, even after Katherine Heigl’s classless “Boy, did our writers suck last year!” rant last offseason.

:: I’m also really enjoying The Office, which has turned up the whole “office romance” thing about three notches, supplementing to the eternal sweetness of the Jim-and-Pam romance with Michael and the new HR woman, and the hilarious Dwight-Andy-Angela “triangle” (with Andy blissfully unaware that he’s even in a “triangle” to begin with).

There was a wonderful scene a few episodes ago that had Jim and Pam call each other on their cell phones at the exact same time, so each got the other’s voicemail, and they proceeded to leave each other messages that reflected the other, almost as if they were actually conversing. I love that show again.

:: My Name is Earl is still funny, but not side-splitting and not nearly as clever as it once was. I don’t think it’s done, but it’s definitely losing steam.

:: That Kath and Kim thing is awful. It reminds me of all those crappy sitcoms that NBC would trot out, one after the other every year, to take the timeslot between Friends and Seinfeld.

:: For campy fun, CSI: Miami is still your best bet. There’s not a thing to take seriously in that show. I love it.

:: On The Amazing Race, I picked out two teams to root for in the first minutes of the season premiere. So wouldn’t you know it: one of those teams got eliminated in that first show, and the other fell two weeks later. Oh well. There’s only one team that bugs me, and I don’t even hate them all that much. As far as who I’m rooting for, I’m not really sure. Maybe the Mom and her son. There’s certainly nothing like the Hippies to root for, or the Barbies to hate. And there’s certainly no Mirna, alas. This year’s edition did take us to New Zealand, home of host and gamerunner Phil, who introduced his dad to the contestants at that leg’s pit stop. Phil’s dad turns out to be a bit of a dirty old man, because when the team of pretty blonds arrived (eliminated later on), he gave them each a nice, lllooonnnggg hug. That’s how it’s done!

:: Wow, that covers just about all the regular teevee viewing I do anymore. Another few years, and unless I pick up some shows, I might be done with network stuff altogether. What else is there to look forward to? More boring lawyer shows from David E. Kelley?

:: Some photos arrived online from the set of the new Star Trek movie. I’m still not excited about this at all, given how tired Trek became in its last years as a going concern and also given my general lack of enthusiasm for JJ Abrams. And this isn’t helping: the new bridge of the Enterprise.

That looks to me like what I imagine Steve Jobs’s bedroom to look like, not the bridge for the Federation’s greatest starship. That’s not a place where you lock phasers on target, it’s where you go to upgrade your iPod. Ugh.

:: Apparently a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie is in the works, with Russell Brand said to be joining the cast as Captain Jack Sparrow’s brother. Who’s Russell Brand? Well, I dunno, but I’m game for more Pirates stuff, since I greatly dug the first three (even At World’s End, which a lot of people thought wasn’t so good). I do hope that the new film moves into a new story or set of stories for Captain Sparrow and the rest of the Black Pearl gang, since it seems to me the tale of Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann is wrapped up nicely.

:: Michael Crichton died last week. I never read any of his books, but I did see a number of movies made from them (I liked the first Jurassic Park, and not so much the second), and I was a big fan for many years of ER (which Crichton created) until it managed the impressive feat of jumping the shark twice in one year. Crichton’s global warming skepticism was disappointing, but nobody’s perfect.

That about covers it for right now.

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On with the show!

OK, that’s it for the politics for a while. Here are a couple of nifty things I saw in the last day or two:

:: xkcd continues to fill me with joy:

I remember when my school district bought a ScanTron machine; suddenly every teacher was doing them. What a fun bandwagon that was….

:: I have a new hero:

This guy rocks hard. (It’s safe for work, but extremely high on the geek quotient.)

Via, but SamuraiFrog has it too.

:: For some small idea of what I was up to while not blogging, there’s this post from yesterday (now buried under all the politics stuff) and a bunch of photos I’ve uploaded to Flickr.

More posting later today….

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Then you may take me to the Faire….

Ah, Jenny, you saucy wench:

Yup, ’twas that time of year again yesterday: our kinda-sorta annual voyage to the Sterling Renaissance Festival. Much fun was had by all, even with a large rainstorm that came through at about 5:00. We ducked into an artisan’s shop and perused the wares closely while the storm expended itself, which took about a half hour, but in the fifteen minutes before the storm, there was a mass exodus of less-than-hardy folk for the gates, owing to the thunder. This was nice in that it made the last hour, and our own departure from the Festival, much easier, with smaller crowds to navigate.

I’d say more, but well, just about everything I said two years ago still applies. I am happy to report that an entire day at the Festival transpired without me having to hear a single git quoting Monty Python and the Holy Grail; maybe that was because this weekend was “Pirate Weekend”, so walking around going ARRRRR! was the order of the day. But hey, I do like me some pirates. We also watched more of the live entertainment than usual, with a highlight being this guy, whose fire-twirling and juggling act we literally lucked into, having chosen the seats in front of his stage to sit upon while we ate the food we’d just bought, not knowing that a show was minutes away from starting:

Yeah, always a big fan of fire. If I ever embark on a life of criminal activity, I’ll definitely be some kind of pyromaniac. (I probably shouldn’t say this kind of thing on the blog…I’ll almost certainly be a Person of Interest in something soon.)

Here’s the Knight, Sir William Something-or-other, who fought for our honor in the joust. (Our honor and that of everyone else standing on that particular corner of the jousting field.) The choreographed combat was actually enhanced by the downpour an hour earlier, which turned the middle of the combat field into a muddy quagmire.

Also, alert readers may recall my 100 Things I Love post from a couple of months ago, on which Number 38 was “Older woman with long hair”. Here’s a good example thereof:

There’s just something about an older woman with long hair that always makes me wonder what kind of life she’s lived to have opted to keep her hair long, and this woman was very lovely. Her companion was a big guy with long silver hair of his own, and matching thick beard and mustache; he was dressed in very fine period costume as well of black with gold and silver highlighting on the sleeves, massive brown leather boots, and a black leather hat. In truth, he looked the way I plan to look in five or ten years’ time. (I didn’t get his picture because he was never facing the right way when I came across these two, and frankly, he probably could have kicked my ass if I’d taken his picture when he didn’t want it taken.)

But anyway, it was a day of fire-juggling, bawdy jokes, turkey legs, fried dough with maple syrup, rain, jousting, cinnamon almonds and cashews, watching glass-blowing, listening to pipers and drummers, watching people get dunked in the pond, and admiring busty women going to great effort to make themselves look even more busty. Yeah, a good day.

(Oh, for the person who came here an hour or so ago wanting to know if the Festival allows water bottles to be carried in, yes, they do. I carried in an entire cooler bag filled with them, as I’ve done each time we’ve gone.)

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