Marky Mark and the Movie Bunch

I saw Mark Wahlberg's 2007 movie Shooter last night. There was... less wrong with it than a lot of action movies. You have to admire a movie with an "Inferno Compositor" and six "Combustion Artists." They seemed to listen to their military advisors to a certain extent, and the physics were frequently correct.

It was OK. I might go so far as to say it was "watchable."

All that being said, in 1998 he was in a movie called The Big Hit. I loved that one, and I forgive him a lot for having starred in it.

Having said that, though, I saw Michael Bay's Transformers and enjoyed it. Then I saw the second one, Revenge of the Fallen, and was less impressed. Didn't even see the third one.

(Is that a problem? I don't want to miss out on any character development that might have happened in that one...)

I have not yet seen Transformers: Age of Extinction, where Wahlberg is replacing Shia LaBeouf. And I'm not sure I want to, because I don't know how I'll feel about his work after that.

We'll see. Someday. I'm in no real rush, to be honest.

Some villains that Marvel Comics won't be bringing back for the movies

So, let me see if I've got this straight: The Amazing Spiderman 2 is no longer the top grossing movie in America, but is still the top grossing movie worldwide. And in the course of this movie, Spidey has to fight the Rhino, Electro, and Green Goblin Jr.

And I'll be honest, I didn't think we'd be seeing the Rhino in a Spidey movie anytime soon, because, frankly, it's kind of a stupid costume. But they took some liberties with the concept, and there he is.

Still, there are some villains in the Marvel Universe that we aren't going to be seeing any time soon, for a number of reasons.

(Full disclosure: Marvel may have less embarrassing villains running around than DC - even if you only take the combined Rogue's Galleries from Batman and the Flash - but they've produced their share of stinkers. And these are only a sampling. I didn't try to get scientific, or make a complete list. These are just a few of the worst - Marvel Marvel has some great heroes and villains, but they haven't all been winners.)

There's a lot of reasons that characters might be flops. Sometimes, science catches up with a character. In Human Torch Comics #27 (1947 - that's Marvel's original Human Torch, a robot who burst into flame when exposed to oxygen), the writers had no idea why it would be a bad idea to introduce Asbestos Lady. She had an asbestos suit. That was her "power."

She disappeared after a few years. Probably into a cancer ward. (In fact, the Marvel Wiki entry for her ends with:

The Asbestos Lady was again imprisoned, but learned in the years that followed that she had contracted cancer due to her constant exposure to asbestos. Her final fate is unknown, but she is believed to have succumbed to the disease.

...but I'm pretty sure that was a retcon that they just threw in later. It doesn't seem to be in the original material that I remember.

Sometimes, a villain just comes out at the wrong time.

Marvel first started using Sinbad (the legendary sailor, not the 90s comedian) in 1974; their version owes a lot more to the Ray Harryhausen movies than to the original legends, of course.

But, as far as timing goes, if you're going to create a mystical genie, who was tricked by Sinbad to go to the future and fight the Fantastic Four (in a one-shot entitled The Fantastic 4th Voyage Of Sinbad), there's nothing wrong with that. There are worse ideas.

But maybe naming him Jihad, and having a cover date on the book that contains him dated September 2001 (a week and a half before a couple of airplanes were flown into the Twin Towers) was a mistake.

Admittedly, the comic book came out in July (because that's how cover dates work). But it still said September.

Chris Claremont (the writer of that particular adventure) was just another victim of 9/11.

But sometimes, the problem has nothing to do with any outside forces. Sometimes, for instance, the writers run out of villains, and just throw some random crap out.

Like The Matador, who first appeared in Daredevil #5 (1964), and seemed to reappear every 10 years or so, just long enough for everybody to forget who he was.

Because what he was, was a bullfighter. That’s it. A guy in a stupid outfit, with a sword that he didn’t use much, and a cape. He liked to use his cape to blind people, and then hit them. That was pretty much it.

If you've been reading Marvel comics for a while, you've probably seen the Kingpin. A fat crimelord modeled on the actor Sydney Greenstreet, he's been a problem for several of Marvel's heroes. But he wasn't the only plus-sized crimelord.

There was, for example, Ulysses X. Lugman, or "the Slug." He was a major drug lord, and he was fat. About 1,200 pounds worth. He wasn’t strong, and he could barely move. Whenever he appeared in a comic frame, he would be eating.

He was smart, and apparently a master planner. He had plenty of henchmen, and lots of money. And, really, he would occasionally demonstrate one superpower: once in a while, he would decide to smother people in the folds of his fat.

Just... eww...

I really don't think that will translate well to the silver screen. But Marvel seems to like fat villains for some reason.

They introduced Pink Pearl in Alpha Flight # 22 (May 1985). She didn't really have powers. She was kind of strong. She was tough (because of her... I don't know, fat armor?). And she was fat. And Canadian.

Other times, the entire concept for a villain is just stupid. For example, in "Obnoxio the Clown vs. the X-Men #1," a one-shot from 1983.

I'm going to ignore Obnoxio the Clown here, because he wasn't a villain so much as a recurring annoyance. But further down this page, we find Eye-Scream. His power? He could turn into any flavor of ice cream.

I think I've made my point just in explaining him.

Sometimes (maybe a lot of times) the writer and the artist are just on drugs.

How about Goody Two-Shoes? He was in The Thing #7 in 1984. He had a bad Swedish accent and "atomic boots." And he kicked things.

Turner D. Century (Spider-Woman #33 - December 1980) hated the modern age.

He dressed like somebody from 1900, rode a flying tandem bike (that's a mannequin on the back seat - even girls in comic books were embarrassed to be seen with him), and his two big weapons were a flamethrower umbrella, and a "time horn" that was supposed to kill anyone under 65.

'Nuff said.

The Disco Era gave us the Hypno-Hustler, in The Spectacular Spider-Man #24 (1978).

He had goggles that could hypnotize people. Or he used his guitar (and his hypnotized backup singers, the Mercy Killers) to hypnotize people. (You see the theme yet?) His boots spit knockout gas and had retractable spikes. And he was so much worse than even his description makes him sound.

But the Disco Era has other crimes to answer for.

In 1978, The Amazing Spiderman #s 182 and 183 gave us a two-fer of crappy villains. The Rocket Racer (who first appeared a year earlier) had a rocket-powered skateboard, and punched people with his rocket powered gloves. And he was fighting The Big Wheel (a guy with a giant mechanical wheel that climbed walls; it was equipped with both guns and grabby-arms).

Even if it wasn't ridiculously dated (and even if one of them wouldn't have a trademark fight with Hasbro), I don't think these two could be redeemed.

Pérák, the two Jiří's and the Nazis

No politics today. It isn't always about politics.

I was randomly hopping around the internet this morning, just following links as I ate breakfast, and happened across a blog (Monkey Muck - I'm not even clear what led me to it, but somebody out there linked to him), where he'd dug up a little piece of animation history.

It was May, 1945. The Germans, who hadn't run a particularly peaceful occupation of Czechoslovakia to begin with, had gotten their noses bloody in the Prague Uprising, which ended in a stalemate, and both sides declared a ceasefire that lasted all of a day before the Soviet troops rolled through the country two days after "Victory in Europe Day," expelling the last of the Nazi troops.

(Yes, that's a simplified look at a long, bloody struggle. There was also no way that the people of Czechoslovakia could know about the ensuing weirdness of the next almost-half-a-century. That's just the least you need to know for perspective.)

Very few people in the West have heard of Jiří Brdečka, but he was a writer and illustrator (you might have heard of Limonádový Joe ("Lemonade Joe"), a series of short stories (occasionally gathered into book form and later adapted as a play), which was made into a movie in 1964, a parody of old-time westerns which reputedly numbered Henry Fonda among its fans and was considered something of a cult classic among Czechs for many years.

(Proponents of the run-on sentence regard me as a master of the craft.)

I'm not sure when they first met, but after the war ended, Brdečka got together with Jiří Trnka (an illustrator and puppeteer), and they would later set up Studio Bratři v triku, the leading producer of Czech animation for decades. The studio logo shows three boys, possibly a reference to the two Jiří's and Eduard Hofman, a writer/director they worked with.

(Bratři v triku is commonly translated as "Brothers in T-shirts," possibly because of the logo. But technically, it's "Brothers in Tricks," and "tricks" (or "trick films") was also a term used to refer to animation at the time. God, I love trivia.)

Of the two Jiří's, I think Jiří Trnka is the more interesting. Considered the founding father of Czech animation, he had worked as a illustrator for Melantrich, a Czech-language publishing house in Prague (named after yet a third Jiří, a Czech Renaissance printer named Jiří Melantrich of Aventino).

As a child, Trnka had carved and sculpted puppets out of wood, to stage shows for his friends. Later, around the same time that he was hired by Melantrich, he started a puppet theater, which closed down with the start of WWII. And later in life, when he found himself uncomfortable with traditional animation, Trnka changed his focus to the medium which gained him some measure of world-wide fame, animated puppetry, mostly stop-motion.

He's been called the "Walt Disney Of The East, although where Disney made films for children and families, Trnka aimed his work at an adult audience.

But this work is before all that. The war had ended, the country was trying to rebuild, and the two Jiří's had gotten together to fill a niche that few other people were considering: animation.

Without a studio, without much backing, they produced a handful of short films together as an experiment, and one of them was Pérák a SS (alternately translated as "Perak and the SS," "The Springman and the SS," and occasionally "The Chimney Sweep").



Pérák the Spring Man was an folktale in WWII Prague, a man who could... well, he could jump. Over trains, walls and small buildings. Much like Victorian England's Spring-Heel Jack (only without the varying descriptions making him into a monster, with burning red eyes, fangs, wings, or whatever). Pérák was just a man. Who jumped.

Czech media would later often retcon him into a superhero, but he started out as just an urban legend of a bouncy guy, who sprang out of alleys and startled people. (It was a simpler time.)

The cartoon was easily on a par with other animated shorts of the period (it was 15 years after Steamboat Willie, and it didn't have a lush feel of Max Fleischer's later work, but aside from the black and white nature of Pérák, compare it even to the current output on Cartoon Network, or any of the 700 Disney channels). And it managed to combine the resentment of a conquered people to their oppressors, with the light-hearted, somewhat fantastical world of the animated Everyman.

(Yes, I can do "pedantic" when I want to. I just don't feel like it too often.)

All in all, it's a cute piece of history that definitely deserves a wider audience.

The Eighth Doctor

The Trophy Wife and I are both major Whovians. We both, as kids, watched Doctor Who reruns on PBS - mostly the Tom Baker years, in both our cases. For us (as for much of the world, I understand) Tom Baker was the Doctor.

In 2005, we heard that Doctor Who had been restarted in the UK, and we champed and quivered and hoped until the SciFi Channel finally condescended to show it a year later. And we loved it. Christopher Eccleston was completely over-the-top as the ninth Doctor, and the production values were so infinitely better than the original series' had been.

And we didn't just watch the new series. We sought out the old - we rented episodes, we bought them (when they were cheap), and, of course, we own most of the new series as well. A lot of it was a sort of misplaced nostalgia: we enjoy the old Doctors for their camp value (except the first Doctor - most of his stuff that we've seen has been relatively boring); and since Russell T. Davies, the man who reincarnated the Doctor, was also a major Whovian, he's kept much of the original continuity, reviving the original villains and referencing the original series in little ways that bring a certain depth to the characters.

But there's always been the one Doctor we could never see - the Eighth Doctor.

In 1996, Paul McGann played the Doctor for a single movie, in an American coproduction as an attempt at a pilot for an American series on the Fox network. When it played originally, I got to see just a few minutes before I had to go to work, and could never find it again (the Trophy Wife never saw it, for whatever reason).

And it's been like the Holy Grail ever since. It was never released in America, and only available on videotape and DVD's for every Region except Region 1 (the USA). We've read about it; we've heard people talk about it. We've never seen it.

Finally, late last month, it was released in America. On DVD. For the first time ever. Just in time for the Trophy Wife's birthday (I'll bet you can see where this is going).

As it turns out, the Eighth Doctor's sole live-action outing was only a Grail-shaped beacon. There's a reason this movie never made it as a series: it's a steaming pile of suck.

It has good points: Paul McGann would have made an awesome Doctor, if he'd had a script, decent costars, and maybe a director who had some clue what the hell he was doing. A writer and producer. And if somebody had managed to shoot the committee who finally put this turd on the small screen.

The production values are good. The special effects are mostly acceptable. His companion is even a good actress, well played by Daphne Ashbrook.

In fact, there are only two major flaws to this particular production. First, the entire script. Which, you know, is a major problem for a movie to overcome, but there's one even bigger puke-inducing factor in this film.

The villain is played by Eric Roberts.

The words "Eric Roberts" are rarely the sign of a quality movie. He hasn't always sucked: he did a decent turn in The Dark Knight, and he really didn't drag down the quality of Heroes. But let me say some other titles.

Cecil B. DeMented.

Miss Castaway and the Island Girls.

For the love of all that's holy, Sharktopus!

One of his earliest roles was on the soap opera Another World. And when they brought his character back two years later, they didn't invite Eric to play him.

And I'm willing to put his performance in Doctor Who up against any other role he's ever played as a pure, unadulterated fecal stain.

Many of the early seasons of Doctor Who fall into that "so bad it's good" category. This didn't even rise to that level. It's another fine example of why no artistic endeavor should ever be created by a committee.

Without dropping any spoilers here, let me just say that this movie failed to live up to my expectations.

Getting Mooned

OK, so there's this series of movies (and books, and graphic novels, and soon to be video games) that you might not have heard of, called the Twilight Saga, by author Stephanie Meyer.

My daughter is a big fan. She realizes how bad they are, but she has all the novels, both in print and audiobook form. She's eagerly awaiting the release of the next movie (although she admits they aren't up to the crappiness level of the books).

However, she stopped buying the associated merchandise (the inaction figures, the brooding posters, and so on) when she had a dream that she was making out with Bella, and Bella wasn't into it. So she woke up, and was all "You bitch! I'm not buying any more of your shit."

I've never read any of the novels. I've never seen any of the movies. I have seen pictures, mostly in passing, and really, the only thought I have about any of them is "Really? You're a teenaged girl, and you think this is hot?"
This is what passes for attractive these days? Goddamn. Well, at least I know I'm straight, if this is what's supposed to look good. I mean, christ, he looks like the Joker in flesh-toned makeup.

Now, admittedly, the girls who find him attractive would be the ones who fall into the "Team Edward" camp. (Yes, that's what they call them.) There's always the "Team Jacob" girls, who like their guys... well... hairier.

Now, I've done a little research, and, from what I can tell, if you don't think like a teenage girl, the characters are wooden, the plots are unoriginal, and Bella, the lead character, is pretty much a personality-free slate for you to write your own name on. (And apparently, people do. In droves.)

And again, really? The girl's name is "Bella Swan"? You came up with a cross between Bela Lugosi and the lead character from Disney's Beauty and the Beast? And then threw in a hint of The Ugly Duckling? (Because yes, the amazingly hot girl doesn't think she's pretty until she goes to a new school and everybody is stunned by her, yadda yadda yadda...)

And then the author came up with the single worst reason for vampires to avoid the sunlight, EVER. The single worst. No other contenders for the title. They sparkle.


If you can't stomach the whole 1:08 (and trust me, I understand), jump in at about the 30 second spot.

I'd heard about this. I thought "OK, fine, they'll glint a little." Then the Trophy Wife showed me the wretched truth.

No, they went for the whole enchilada: the full-body diamond sparkle. Like he's the victim of some kind of horrible BeDazzler accident.

Something like what they did to Emma Frost in X-Men Bastardizations: Wolverine.
As it turns out, it seems that there are other characters. They've got other vampires, many of who only have first names, like Esme, Rosalie and Carlisle; there are other werewolves, with names like Sam Uley, Embry Call and Seth Clearwater (because Native American werewolves would naturally have redneck names).

And there might even be other human characters, but nobody cares about them.

I have to agree with my daughter, though. I am hereby declaring myself part of "Team Alice."

Alice was apparently turned into a vampire in the Roaring Twenties. Even if she was supposed to be crazy, she was still a child of the sexual revolution after WWI. She might go for a girl.

If Ms Meyer wants me to see her movies or read her books, Bella will drop both Edward and Jacob, and go for Alice.

I like this idea.

Beating a dead womp rat

So, my son the Wookie came in and informed me of some sad news last night. George Lucas is planning on yet another release of the Star Wars six-pack in two years. This time, in 3-D. Maybe this is what the Mayans meant when they prophesized that the world would end in 2012.

Did anyone have any question whether or not George Lucas was a whore?

I'll admit, he isn't a cheap whore. It's not like he'll sell himself to any syphilitic leather-freak for a rock of crack. He's definitely a top-of-the-line, high-dollar prostitute - an extravagant courtesan, if you will. But in the end, an expensive whore is still a whore, right?

And the worst part of the whole story? He's releasing the second trilogy first. He's so enamored of his own "vision" that he can't seem to realize that, even by adding a coat of 3-D gloss to the prequels, they're still going to be a matched set of turds. It will just look like you can reach out and touch them, and who wants that? They're still turds, just in 3-D.

He has said that the "Avatar" experience convinced him that "Star Wars" is ready for the state-of-the-art 3D treatment.

What lesson did that teach you, George? When there's nothing new in the story, you should just make it prettier?

Look, it's simple. The first movie came out, and it was campy pulp science fiction, but it was well-done. (OK, I thought the first twenty minutes or so, with all the whining and exposition on Tatooine, were slow and plodding, but maybe that's just me.) And yes, George, I know, you want all the cool kids to call it "A New Hope."

But fuck you, George. It's Star Wars. Live with it.

Then came the The Empire Strikes Back, and it was flashier and better, but still essentially just well-done 1930's space opera in a shinier coat. It had issues, but it was a good movie.

And then there was Return of the Jedi, which had the Ewoks. But other than that, it was a decent piece of cinema that wrapped everything up nicely. It, too, was a good movie. Weaker than the second one (and, incidentally, did I mention that it had Ewoks?), but not everything has to be bigger and flashier, right?

But George, I'm sorry: somewhere between 1983 and 1997, the bovine spongiform encephalopathy kicked in, didn't it? Our first evidence was that initial re-release, where you cleaned up the special effects and tweaked it just a little. That's fine. That wasn't the problem. In fact, in a lot of cases, it was an improvement.

Here's the thing, George. I know you want to mythologize your characters. I know they're all special little snowflakes to you, and you want them to be good people, and you want flowers to spring up wherever they step. But you know what, George?

Han shot first!

Jesus Christ on a popsickle stick, he's the fucking anti-hero! He's allowed to shoot the guy in the goofy green rubber mask!

Let's be honest: Greedo has already explained that Han's about to get ass-raped by Jabba the Slugg, so Han has every right to blow a hole in Greedo's chest. I know you want to paint a halo on him, but this is part of Han's character. It doesn't make him a bad man, it just makes him a less-perfect man.

And then, George, oh, then, everything just went to hell, didn't it? You sank deeper into madness, and you released the second trilogy. Why did you have to do that? I just have three words for you. (Or two words, depending on how you count it. I don't really care.)

Jar Jar Binks.

There's more. Oh, there's so much more - there's the whiny kid who couldn't act, who you decided should be play Mannequin Skywalker; there's the "yellow peril" Trade Federation; there's just so much to bitch about. But overshadowing them all, there's Jar Jar Binks.

Nobody liked him, George. He was a ridiculous, vaguely racist stereotype that sucked the life out of any scene he was in. And with so little life in the movie to begin with, why would you want to fuck it up further?

(Yes, George, "racist." Just because the guy modeling for Jar Jar, who you completely covered with CGI, was black, this doesn't mean that the character wasn't a bad mutation of Stepin Fetchit crossed with the Easter Bunny and pumped full of crystal meth.)

You know, George, it's starting to get sad. There's the second trilogy, there's the re-release (and the re-re-release, and on into infinity), there's the board games and the video games and the "interactive" hand-held games, and the books and the toys and the crappy TV shows, and the mugs shaped like character heads, and the fucking comic books, and the Landspeeder beds, and all of the worst merchandising ever invented. You've done everything you can to keep pulling milk out of this cash cow, and at this point, you're just sucking dust.

Or to put it another way, you can masturbate a corpse all you want, but you know something? Maybe you should save your lotion and tissues for somebody who'll appreciate it.

Scott Pilgrim vs. My Headache

Otaku (おたく / オタク?) (oh-tah-kooh): a Japanese term used to refer to people with obsessive interests, particularly anime, manga, or video games.

Let me just start out by saying that I've never been an anime (Japanese animation) or manga (Japanese comic books) otaku. However, with three barely-adult kids and a stepmother-in-law who worked in Japan for a while, I had a certain amount of exposure to the media.

To be honest, those weren't my only experiences with either art form. I watched Speed Racer and other cheap syndicated Japanese cartoons as a kid. But I wasn't just an innocent consumer: anime was just getting popular when my kids were starting out, and I felt they should be in front of the curve.

Admittedly, it turned out to be a geekier curve than I'd planned, but what did I know?

So Ghost in the Shell, Akira - I brought these to my children, not the other way around. (OK, admittedly, we shut off Akira a few minutes in, because it was a little heavy for the kids at that point.) We even have a VHS copy of one of the early, stunningly bad Fist of the North Star videos somewhere in the garage.

However, I've gotten most of my exposure to anime and manga (much like chicken pox) from my children. From the earliest experiences (yes, that would be Pokémon) to more "artistic" fare like Princess Mononoke, odd issues of various manga titles that came through the house, video games, whatever was around.

To be honest, I've always been a fan of video games (never obsessively, but a lot of hours of my life have been wasted holding a controller and staring at a screen).

Nintendo launched their Nintendo Entertainment System in America the same year that Luke and Nicole were born, and by the time they were old enough to play it, prices had dropped enough that I could use them as an excuse to get one. ("Besides, Nintendo had educational games, too!" Funny how few of those ended up in my house...)

But I'm a culture sponge. Aside from wanting to keep an eye on what my kids were getting into, I've always had an interest in whatever oddities turn potentially ordinary people into... well, otaku (although, in the interest of full disclosure, I didn't learn the word until a few years ago). Sometimes my interest is just to sample whatever this weirdness is. Sometimes, it's more of the "point and laugh" variety.

So when my daughter and the Trophy Wife informed me that we were all going to see Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, I approached the idea with a little trepidation. Judging by the trailers, it might be a light-hearted movie in a moderately unique style; but it might just as easily end up a confusing mess with enough bright lights and jump cuts to cause seizures in audience members. (Which, incidentally, is the best possible description of the opening credits...)

But the director, Edgar Wright, also gave us Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, so I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Now, my first surprise was the audience. Far from making up the bulk of the crowd, there were no 14-year-old girls in attendance at all - I guess they've all moved on to sparkly vampires and emo werewolves. Mostly, we were surrounded by mid-twenties guys.

(And, really, it didn't even qualify as a "crowd." But somehow, even with the relatively sparse attendence, we managed to end up with the voice model for Goofy sitting behind us, starting with a giggly "Yeah!" during the ads for Jackass 3-D, and ending with loud, echoing guffaws at every butt joke.)

This is an amazingly funny movie, with laugh-out-loud moments (as the guy behind me continued to prove). It also has great music and spectacularly stylized visuals - and by "stylized," I don't mean artistic or confusing, but "in the style of." In this case, in the style of manga (more than anime, really), and of video games from the Eighties and early Nineties.

The secondary actors (and the hair of the female lead) even manage to catch many of the over-the-top characterizations of manga. The opening studio logo looks (and sounds) like a Nintendo starting screen, and one of the last villains Scott fights even carries a sword with 8-bit graphics.

But that's one of the weaknesses of this movie, as well. It never really figures out who it's target audience might be. My best guess would be an otaku from the late Eighties. None of the video game references are current; they're all a decade or two behind. (Which may be just because the movie is Canadian, I suppose...)

There's a strange innocence to Scott Pilgrim; despite continual references to sex, there isn't any. People sleep together, but for the most part, that's all they do. (Which is kind of a shame - the lead actress is ridiculously hot, having starred previously in Sky High and Live Free or Die Hard.)

I really enjoyed the music from Scott Pilgrim, which is a good thing. One of the ongoing subplots is a "Battle of the Bands" that his group, "Sex Bob-omb," has entered. (And if you don't get the Mario reference there, I suspect that either there's no hope for you, or you're a healthy and well-adjusted personality. Your choice.)

Something this movie does (and many movies fail at) is linking each fictional band with an actual band, for a continuity of sound. Beck does all the songs for Scott Pilgrim's band (including the second-lamest "I wrote you a love song" scene ever filmed).

So, overall, I recommend this movie, as an enjoyable, surreal bit of fluff. I'm not sure whether seeing it more than once will do you any good, and it won't change your life. But for the 112 minutes you'll spend in the theater (plus previews and crap, of course), at least you'll enjoy yourself.

But what do I know? Somehow, I thought anime would turn out to be cooler than it was.

Puttin' on the Ritz

In 1929 (twelve years before the US entered WWII), a Jewish man with the unfortunate last name of Berlin wrote a pop song called "Puttin' on the Ritz," which was featured the next year as the title song for a musical starring then-popular vaudeville and Broadway performer Harry Richman (playing a song promoter named Harry Raymond) in his very first movie role, and a 20-year-old Joan Bennett in her seventh.



This was originally filmed in two-color Technicolor, but only black-and-white copies survive today. The lyrics are slightly different from what you may be used to (assuming that you're familiar with the song at all).

Have you seen the well-to-do
Up on Lennox Avenue
On that famous thoroughfare
With their noses in the air
High hats and colored collars
White spats and fifteen dollars
Spending ev'ry dime
For a wonderful time

If you're blue and you don't know
Where to go to,
Why don't you go where Harlem glitz,
Puttin' on the Ritz!

Spangled gowns
upon the bevy
of highbrows
from down the levee,
all misfits,
puttin' on the Ritz!

That's where each and every Lulubelle goes,
every Thursday evening with her swell beaux,
rubbin' elbows.

Come with me
and we'll attend
their jubilee
and see them spend their last two bits,
Puttin' on the Ritz!

This referred to a fad, popular at the time among residents of Harlem, of putting on their best clothes and parading up and down Lenox Avenue.
_____

Update (3/10/2012): Two years after this originally appeared, storeinchitown pointed out something I'd missed. In my transcription, in the second verse, I typed "highbrows" - it was a term I was familiar with. But the line should read:

Spangled gowns
upon the bevy
of high browns
from down the levee,
all misfits,
puttin' on the Ritz!

"High browns" refers to the lighter-skinned blacks who shop owners would hire every so often; I've heard the term before, but you just... OK, I just forget about little bits of racism like that.

It also explains the next line, "...all misfits" - he isn't making fun of the people watching them, but of the darkies putting on airs, like they're as good as us white folks.

The original song just gets worse every time I hear it.
_____

It would reappear in 1939 in the movie Idiot's Delight adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, and starring Clark Gable.



This was the only film where Gable ever performed a dance number. And fortunately, after the success of Gone With the Wind that same year, they didn't ask him to sing much, either.

(If you noticed the dancer second from the left edge of the screen was barely in step and not doing the same arm movements as the other chorus girls, that's because she was holding up her top = you see the strap break right about the 24-second mark.)

Around that time (but I'm not sure if it was 1938 or 1944 - many of his live albums from that period were collections of two or more shows), Benny Goodman started performing the song as a clarinet solo. (I couldn't find an embeddable version, and didn't want to pay for it, so the link takes you to the Google player.)

According to Wikipedia:

The song is in AABA form, with a verse. According to John Mueller (in the 1986 "Astaire Dancing - The Musical Films") the central device in the A section is the "use of delayed rhythmic resolution: a staggering, off-balance passage, emphasized by the unorthodox stresses in the lyric, suddenly resolves satisfyingly on a held note, followed by the forceful assertion of the title phrase." The marchlike B section, which is only barely syncopated, acts as a contrast to the previous rhythmic complexities. According to Alec Wilder, in his study of American popular song, the rhythmic pattern in "Puttin' on the Ritz" is "the most complex and provocative I have ever come upon."

For the 1946 film Blue Skies, Berlin revised the vaguely racist lyrics to the version most people are familiar with, and it was performed by the always-brilliant Fred Astaire. (Some of the other videos on this page get extremely grainy on full-screen, but not this one.)

Have you seen the well-to-do
Up and down Park Avenue
On that famous thoroughfare
With their noses in the air

High hats and narrow collars
White spats and lots of dollars
Spending every dime
For a wonderful time

Now, if you're blue
And you don't know where to go to
Why don't you go where fashion sits
Puttin' on the Ritz
Different types who wear a daycoat
Pants with stripes and cutaway coat
Perfect fits
Puttin' on the Ritz

Dressed up like a million dollar trooper
Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper
Super-duper

Come, let's mix where Rockefellers
Walk with sticks or umb-er-ellas
In their mitts
Puttin' on the Ritz

Astaire then performs an extended tap-dance number, after which he ends the song. Possibly for time, or possibly because he was out of breath at that point, they chose not do Berlin's last two verses.

Tips his hat just like an English chappie
To a lady with a wealthy pappy
Very snappy
Puttin' on the Ritz

You'll declare it's simply topping
To be there and hear them swapping
Smart tidbits
Puttin' on the Ritz

Arguably the most famous version was performed in Young Frankenstein by Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle (it was also included in the 2007 Broadway musical of the same name).



In 1982, a synth-pop version of the song was recorded by a man whose parents had given him the first name of Taco, and it was his only American hit. Perhaps because Taco was living in Holland at the time and had been born in Indonesia, he didn't understand that including performers in blackface might not be greeted well by the American audience. MTV forced him to re-edit the video to remove the controversial scenes.



It's been performed numerous other times, by an assortment of bands from Shiny Happy Guns (covering the Taco version on their first album) to the Jackson 5 (covering the Astaire version as part of a medley in their 1977 TV show).

But no matter who performs it, for me, Peter Boyle's harmonies will always be a vital part of the song.

Xanadu - through caverns measureless to man

For Christmas this year, I got my wife a couple of musicals. And one of them was Xanadu. I saw that back in 1980 when it came out, and it would seem that I had managed to block out much of this movie.

It's somewhat sad that the best part of the DVD are the "Making of" documentary and the fact that the soundtrack is included on a separate CD. The soundtrack is amazing, and, in its late-70's way, fully worth the price of admission (the price of admission, of course, is sitting through the entire hour-and-a-half of this movie).

As the wretched excess and self-inflicted humiliation of the Saturday Night Fever 70s slowly gave way to the wretched excess and self-absorbtion of the Gordon Gekko 80s, Xanadu burst forth upon the public much like a tapeworm might quietly slip through an unpuckered sphincter.

This was not originally planned as a piece of classic cinema. And god knows that, in the end, they succeeded at that.

This had originally been planned as a small roller-disco movie. And the producer realized that there was a lot that was wrong with the film, like the fact that there wasn't a plot. But before they managed to fix that little problem, Olivia Newton John, coming off the success of Grease two years before, expressed an interest in being part of the movie.

Olivia Newton-John was born in 1948 in Cambridge, England, the daughter of a Welshman named Brinley Newton-John, an MI-5 officer on the Enigma project in WWII, and a German mother, Irene Born, the eldest child of the Nobel prize-winning atomic physicist Max Born. (Which brings a certain humor to her 1980's nickname, "Olivia Neutron Bomb.")

She had a career as a squeaky-clean country-pop singer; she'd had a couple of minor hits in the UK, USA and Australia (the chief being 1973's Let Me Be There, which earned her a Grammy as Best Country Female and the number one Country Album for two weeks that year). Then, in 1974, she represented England in the Eurovision song contest, singing a ditty that she later said she hated, called Long Live Love.



She placed #4, behind a little group named ABBA singing Waterloo.

She had a string of hits in the mid-70s, but they started to wane by 1977, so, at the age of 29, she starred as a high-school senior in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Grease. The movie revived a flagging career, and spurred her to change her image to something a little less virginal. None of which explains her appearance as the slightly ethereal Kira (which doesn't strike me as the perfect nickname for "Terpsichore" - of course, she's a singer playing the muse of dance, so what do you want? Consistency?)

Gene Kelly does a reasonably good job with his part as a former (and soon-to-be-again) nightclub owner. After him, the next best acting job came from Newton-John (whose part consists primarily of smiling and skating out of frame while glowing in various colors), and then the bar is lowered considerably - many of the fine performances in this film are at roughly the "high school play" level. If that good.

The romantic "lead" is turned in by a wooden Michael Beck, also known for the cult film The Warriors (if by "cult film," you mean "almost as bad as Xanadu." He is, in fact, quoted as having said "The Warriors opened a lot of doors in film for me, which Xanadu then closed.")

This film had more wrong with it than it got right. The first time you see Gene Kelly, he's on the beach playing his clarinet as the sun rises over the Pacific Ocean (think about that for a second - here's a hint: "the sun rises in the...").

You occasionally come across a description of this film as an unofficial sequel to 1944's Cover Girl, in that Gene Kelly played a nightclub owner in 1944 named Danny McGuire, and in 1980 played a former nightclub owner named Danny McGuire. But they have to say "unofficial," because that's the extent of the similarity (and, of course, because the makers of Xanadu didn't have the rights to the infinitely better film).

As I mentioned earlier, the director knew that the script had a lot of problems. And after a number of rewrites, he got it back and realized that they still hadn't fixed those same problems. So he decided to make it a series of music videos, loosely strung together with what the porn industry calls "fast-forwards."

(Let me just say here that the "fast-forwards" line is my wife's joke. You all think she's such a nice, quiet, cultured person just because she sings opera. And, admittedly, because she's a really nice person. But there's this dark side that you just don't get to see, and it really isn't that far under the surface, either...)

Easily the best part of the movie is a piece called Dancin', blending songs in the styles of the '40s and the '80s into a gloriously Frankenstinian whole.



(This was a "live" version produced to promote the movie, and doesn't have the visual impact of the actual movie clip; that can be seen here, along with the label "embedding disabled by request.")

The 80's band in Dancin' is played by The Tubes, who were up until then known for lead singer Fee Waybill donning the persona of "Quay Lewd" to fight his way through songs like White Punks on Dope.



The Tubes were some of the only performers whose career wasn't stunted by Xanadu. One of the dancers, for example, an anonymous muse played by the Fosse-trained Sandahl Bergman, would stop dancing entirely, play opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in the notably-bad Conan the Barbarian (where she had to do her own stunts, because they couldn't find a 5'10" stunt double for her), then play the villain in the infinitely-worse Red Sonja, and finish out her career with a series of B-movies where she gets naked and shot at a lot. (She also appears extensively in the 1983 video by Helix, Heavy Metal Love, if anybody cares.)

What can you say about a movie where the romantic "lead" skates full speed toward a brick wall because he thinks it won't end badly? But on the plus side of the equation, there's a scene with Newton-John dancing with Gene Kelly (which, it turns out, was filmed later on a closed set because everybody was disappointed that they didn't have any musical numbers together) where you can plainly see that Kelly was 100% responsible for the choreography and training of Ms Newton-John. Watching her imitate his dancing style almost makes up for the clumsy transition back to reality at the end.

Having been planned as a roller-disco movie, the last 15 or 20 minutes are an extended dance sequence with a series of forgettable songs, all brightly lit and colorful. It's all eye-candy, with no nutritional value whatsoever.

In fact, with all of the glowing people and bad animation scattered throughout this shiny celluloid turd, this film can be said to be the progenitor of every Skittles ad ever made.

(Understand, when I say "bad animation," I'm not referring to the Don Bluth cartoon in the middle, which is very well animated, if completely insipid and with no reason to be there.)

Remember the old joke that explained that a camel is "a horse made by a committee?" This film stands as a testament to the truth at the heart of that statement. No film should ever be made by committee, and Xanadu is definitely a camel.

A Real American... Something

My son made me go see the live-action G.I. Joe movie last weekend. Now, the following article may contain a spoiler or two. But the damned movie's been out for a month - I'm thinking I'm safe from the wrath of the disgruntled fanbase. Everybody who really, really, really wanted to see the movie probably already has. But if you haven't, be warned.

(And if you've been waiting to see this movie and you aren't seven, how sad are you, anyway?)

Can't say it was a great movie: it was mostly a celebration of fight scenes and crap blowing up. But in the end, that's all GI Joe has ever been, so why strain yourself, right? Well, a couple of random thoughts on the movie:

1. Christopher Eccleston (the 9th Doctor) could have phoned in his part - unless he's given significant scenery to chew, he tends to come off bland and restrained. (In fact, since they gave him the full-face metal mask of Destro at the end, he could now literally phone his part in for the inevitable sequel.)

2, Thank the 36 aspects of Shiva that the producers realized in time that they needed to change Cobra Commander's costume, or they would have risked throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into a movie where the head bad guy looks like a Klansman with a leather fetish.

3. I did appreciate the exchange between a drugged out Marlon Wayans saying "Hey, look, he's got realistic hair!" and reaching out to muss it, only to have his wrist grabbed and spit out "...and a Kung-Fu Grip!" But I'm a big fan of the cheesy joke.

4. Brendan Frasier and Arnold Vosloo both make appearances in here, apparently because they've placed the GI Joe base of operations in Egypt. (Or maybe because Stephen Sommers liked working with them. It's hard to tell.)

It's a movie full of pretty people - there's eye candy for you no matter what your gender choice. Although there were limited ethnic choices - there's white men, black men, oriental men... and white women. At least the two leading white women they chose, Rachel Nichols and Sienna Miller, are eyeball-meltingly hot, if that's what you're into. So at least I had something to stare at for the extended periods where my brain was decomposing under the weight of the product placement.

Because, really, that's what the movie is all about. The cartoon (and probably, to a lesser extent, the comic book) was all about selling toys, but this movie has taken that open commercialism, and raised it to a whole new level of avarice.

There are, of course, all the usual, expected tie-ins: the action figures (of course, always the action figures), the movie posters, the soundtrack, the t-shirts, the coffee mugs, the video game (apparently not a winner), and, of course, the comic book.

But what stunned me was the amount of product placement this movie piled into its 118 minutes. From the billboards in the background to the products in the foreground, I'm not sure that the company paid for a single prop outside of guns and costumes. When Rex breaks into the underground bunker and finds the computer screens, the program in question is specifically and prominently shown to be a Norton product (leading to one of the most tenuous movie tie-ins ever).

I think what stunned me the most was the Double Bubble advertisements pretending to be part of the movie. Right before the Norton incident, Duke offers Rex a piece of Double Bubble (which he identifies by name), and explains how it always calms him down before he goes into battle; and later, their computer guy insists on taking the last piece of the (specifically-named) Double Bubble, and, in fact, is shown happily blowing a bubble with it.

Now, this movie is based on the 3.75" action figure/cartoon synergy of the Eighties. When I was a kid, though, I owned G.I. Joes. Not the action figures that my sons played with years later, but the original, 12" toys.

In 1963, Stan Weston had merchandising rights to a TV show called The Lieutenant. (This happened to be the first series created and produced by Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame. Majel Barrett probably met then-married Roddenberry on the set of The Lieutenant; a few years later, his marriage failing, he hired Majel for the first pilot of Star Trek, and the rest is... well, it's a long-running job for Majel, anyway...)

Weston went to the toy company Habro, makers of Mr Potato Head; playing on the success of the Barbie line of fashion dolls, which had been launched by Mattel four years earlier, he convinced them to produce a line of military-themed dolls.

(On a side note, the Hassenfeld Brothers toy company was founded in the Twenties by brothers Henry and Halal Hassenfeld; they didn't technically shorten their name to Hasbro until 1968, but most of the histories you read tell you that the first G.I. Joe's were made by "Hasbro" - go figure.)

(On another, only-vaguely-related side note, when Weston approached the nascent Hasbro-to-be, it had only been three years since they had marketed Mr Potato Head with a hard plastic body: prior to that, it was just plastic parts on push pins, and you stuck them in actual potatoes.)

Now, the original GI Joe had a prominent facial scar, which they did, in fact, give in the movie to Duke (Channing Tatum - no relation to Tatum O'Neal, if you're curious, although he was in a movie in 2006 with Steven Randazzo, who was in Basquiat ten years ealier with Tatum O'Neal - thank you, Kevin Bacon). The official story on the scar is that it was a trademarkable addition to the face; my personal theory is that it was added because the toy company realized that Joe looked a lot like a square-jawed Ken without it, and that just wouldn't do. Joe underwent only minor cosmetic changes for years, and with limited exceptions, they all had the scar.

Two years after their American release, Palitoy became the licensed distributor of GI Joe in the UK and Australia, using the same designs as their American counterpart. The British version was named Action Man, and the head of product development for Palitoy, William A.G. (Bill) Pugh, is credited with the creation of the "lifelike" flocked hair, Kung-Fu Grip, and the wierdly-moving "Eagle Eyes" changes to the design. So it might have been polite if some mention of Action Man had made it into the movies.

The retooled "GI Joe" apparently now stands for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity (it probably took them hours to come up with that one); it originally meant "Government Issue" (the attitude being that, if you're in the military, the government owned you as much as it owned everything it issued to you). Originally planning to call the prototypes by original names like "Rocky the Marine", "Skip the Sailor", and "Ace the Pilot," they instead decided to go with the more generic "GI Joe" based on a 1945 film, The Story of G.I. Joe.

(That movie, loosely based on the experiences of war correspondent Ernie Pyle, starred Robert Mitchum and Burgess Meredith, a couple of minor actors, and an actual group of war correspondents, and a bunch of American GI's about to be transferred from the European theater to the Pacific. Ernie Pyle also acted as technical advisor for the film, which stole several punchlines from Bill Mauldin's cartoons. Just after filming was finished, the GI's were transferred to Okinawa, where many of them were killed, along with Ernie Pyle himself, having never seen their movie.)

And now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

Just one question

OK. So let me get this straight (so to speak).

J.K. Rowling has come out and said... excuse me. Let me rephrase that.

In an interview, author J.K. Rowling said that headmaster of her school for wizards, Dumbledore, is gay. Not that she ever made him do anything homosexual, but that she kept that fact in mind.

This has caused great consternation among the right wing.

So now, we are supposed to be concerned with the intent of people who don't exist. Not their actions (which never happened), but the non-actions (which also never happened). Is that about right?

We are supposed to get outraged by the things that aren't done by fictional characters, in a world that likewise doesn't exist.

I think my brain just exploded.

Everybody else is doing Memorial Day stuff. I'm going to do a movie review.

I very rarely see movies in theaters any more. Mostly because people, as a whole, suck. (Have I said that before?) For example, we went to a theater the other day (summer blockbusters often require the Big Screen), and I ended up with some cackling idiot behind me who talked to the screen. Apparently, the advent of the VCR took away the inclination of parents to train their children with the most important life lesson of all:

Shut the hell up during the movie!

So my wife and I get most of our movie-watching experiences at home on DVD. And the other night, we were looking for a random piece of fluff to watch - nothing too intellectual or high-brow. And since we'd enjoyed the Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore vehicle "Music and Lyrics" last week, we decided to rent the other music-related Hugh Grant movie from last year, "American Dreamz."

Let me make the following disclaimers here:

1. I'm not the world's biggest Mandy Moore fan. In fact, I make it a policy to avoid movies by pop princesses. But that's just me. I've never seen a Britney Spears movie (is there more than one, yet?). I never even saw a single episode of that Jessica Simpson reality show. On the other hand, I did see Dick Tracy, despite the fact that Madonna was in it. Likewise Vibes, with Cindy Lauper. (You see? I'll never get those hours of my life back. It's important to stick to your principles, even in movie-watching.)

(It's strange, really. Drew Barrymore, then Mandy Moore. Mr. Grant seems to be picking his female costars from the ranks of women who most of America think are amazingly beautiful, but who I don't really find attractive. It's like he's stalking me, trying to force me to watch movies with his costar, despite my disinterest in them. But I suppose that my paranoid fantasies are entirely unrelated to the subject matter at hand. As is my nightmare of Ann Coulter as a dominatrix, for that matter...)

2. I often enjoy the work of Hugh Grant. (But that's because I'm amazingly shallow.)

3. I have never seen an episode of American Idol. (Apparently, I'm not shallow enough.)

4. And lastly, I did, in fact, enjoy this movie. But that doesn't mean that I'm not going to find fault in it.

For those of you who haven't seen it, this is a comedy about what happens when a Muslim terrorist cell infiltrates the cast of a show identical to American Idol, in a plot to use a bumbling (but music-obsessed) suicide bomber to kill the bumbling (but recently-reelected) President of the United States because of the damage he's caused in the Middle East. Hijinks ensue.

There are other "Dreamerz" (American Idol lookalikes) who I can recognize, even having avoided the show - Clay Aiken, Bo Brice, and a third one who might be Fantasia but I don't know enough about her to recognize any of her quirks.

Apparently, somebody wanted to make a parody that had enough pop culture (Mandy Moore, American Idol, and to an extent, Hugh Grant) that they could skewer the President, and still make money in red states. (And maybe they had dreamz of Joe Sixpack in Utah seeing this movie, having an epiphany, and suddenly becoming a Democratic activist. Yeah, good luck with that.)

This is a hugely unsubtle movie. Everything was painted with these huge, wide strokes that would make a housepainter proud. I'm not going to use the phrase "thinly-veiled" to describe anything, because this movie had no veils at all.

Not even on the Muslim women.

~~ ba-DUM!! ching! ~~

(To be honest, there were no Muslim women in evidence, except for a few who were thoroughly Americanized. So no burka's at all. There were no women at the terrorist camp at all, unless they were behind a couple of the cheap fake beards, doing some kind of Life-of-Brian homage. But I'm going to assume they weren't, at this point.)

My biggest argument with this movie, aside from the huge, unforgiving club they use to hammer their points home, would be the fact that their Bush-clone is a mindless drone whose only responsibility for the mess in the Middle East is the fact that he allowed himself to be led into it.

I can accept certain aspects of that.

a. George Bush is a hugely unimaginative C-student who is more than willing to allow himself to be led by people who appear to know more than he does.

b. George Bush has little or no knowledge of the Middle East.

c. Other people have instigated all of the damage he has caused in America and around the world.

However, rather than allowing himself to be led blindly into this mess, I personally believe that George Bush walked into everything with open eyes. He may not have been smart enough to set anything in motion himself, but he is the man in charge, and he's just too flamingly stupid to see that he's leading the charge into a bloody morass that's going to take years, if not decades, to dig our way out of.

In the movie, the Bush-clone is actually a good person, if stupid, who would stop the mess if he could. I don't believe that.

But, sure. See American Dreamz. Just don't expect anything world-shaking.

On the other hand, maybe you should rent it for your teenaged daughter and those proto-Republican mall-girls she hangs out with. Maybe it'll work on them.

Deep Water in a Shallow "Fountain"

* * * Warning!! * * *
The following review doesn't even try to avoid spoilers. There's no way to talk about this film without revealing entirely too much. And I'm not even going to try. I recommend not reading any farther until you've seen the movie The Fountain.

I will say that it's worth seeing at least once, but not necessarily at full price, and definitely not if you're a single guy. For the average guy, this is a movie to take a girl to - preferably a girl who enjoys having long philosophical talks about the meaning of what you've just seen. If both of you watch Nascar and reruns of Beverly Hillbillies or the Munsters, just move on now.

Go. This is not the movie for you. Borat is playing at the other end of the Cineplex. Just go there. Trust me. You'll be much happier.

We have now stopped making "safe" comments about The Fountain. You have been warned.

Yesterday, we went to see The Fountain, a new film staring Wolverine and that lady from the Mummy movies. This is one of the few times I wished that I smoked pot - I suspect that the best way to see this movie is to be stoned out of your mind.

The ads say that it's "a love story that spans 3,000 years!" That may or may not be true. From my vantage point, though, what we had were two stories and a symbolic metaphor, all twisted together into an hour-and-a-half-long rope.

There's no real coherent, linear story line here, nor is there a standard "happy ending." I suppose that some people might leave the theater feeling that this was a life-changing movie. Those same people probably also get more out of the works of Deepak Chopra than I do.

It was a beautiful movie, a giant, throbbing romance novel of a movie. The modern-day love story between the dying woman and the research scientist is a real heart-render. Some people might even think that this movie was deep and meaningful. However, if you've already come to terms with the fact that everybody dies, you aren't likely to find your view of the universe altered by The Fountain - it's shallow, in the same way that a model earnestly explaining a self-help concept she'd read about: easy to watch, but in the end, you come away slightly confused by some of the concepts that had been washing over you.

Hugh Jackman was given the opportunity to emote like a champ. His character goes through the entire range of human emotion, and he did it with style. He might very well garner an Academy Award nomination for his work in this film. I'll be surprised if Ms. Weisz does the same, though.

Between The Fountain and his stints in the various X-Men movies (and the upcoming Wolverine, for that matter), did you notice that Hugh Jackman is apparently making a career out of potentially immortal characters?

It all ties together pretty well. In the future, the bald Wolverine is shepherding an ancient tree toward a nebula called Sebulba, he talks to the tree as if it were a dead lover, and he keeps seeing the present-day Mrs. Mummy as a hallucination. In the present, the dying Mummy-lady shows Dr. Wolverine the nebula Sebulba through her telescope, he's trying to cure cancer with the bark of a newly-discovered old-growth tree from Central America, and she has written a book about the Conquistador Wolverine. In the past (or in her book, or maybe both), Conquistador Wolverine (or would that be Carcayú?) is on a quest through the Mayan empire trying to find the Tree of Life.

I'm really not clear whether the last scene of the Conquistador storyline, where he flowers to death, was the abrupt end of a relatively abrupt man, or a hallucination caused by the Tree Sap of Life ripping through his body. I can go either way on that question. (My wife, by the way, leaned over at that point and whispered, "See? That's why you shouldn't swallow apple seeds.") Although the fact that Conquistador Wolverine turned into a shrub, and Bald Wolverine was pushing a tree through space in a snow-globe is an interesting coincidence. And Dr. Wolverine planted a seed on top of her grave when she died, which means that the tree he's trucking through the stars might just be the tree that she grew into from... oh, Christ, forget it. It's not worth the headache.

There were a number of recurring themes in The Fountain. A vaguely Moorish lattice-work, golden light, the cross, and (obviously) the Tree of Life all recur frequently. Interestingly, so do small hairs and gummy saliva.

In this film, we had an Australian man and a British woman starring in the main roles of a film shot in New York and Canada. Throughout the modern and futuristic portions of the film, they sounded generically Midwest-American. However, in the early part of the film (when they're both playing Spaniards), they used vaguely British accents.

Some hard-core Christians are going to be upset about the way this movie intertwines Christian, Buddhist and pagan imagery, and even a touch of Mayan and Muslim, if you look hard enough. But they'd have a hard time with the central concept of this movie: that this man either lived forever, or kept getting reincarnated, or was a symbol for eternal life.

I think that my son Luke had the best summation of the movie. He thought that the target demographic for this movie was potheads and people who don't understand movie trailers. Which seems close enough, but I think he left out New Agey types and people who read romance novels.

Having seen The Fountain, I have to say that I don't think it will make a great deal of money in the theaters. But I also won't be surprised if the first run of DVDs sells out within days.

Prejudice, the 82nd Airborne and Brokeback Mountain

Let's talk about homosexuality for a moment.

First, let's consider the Christian perspective. That's the excuse that a lot of people choose to structure their personal dislike of homosexuals around. "It's in the Bible! God hates fags!" Of course, there are a number of answers to that. The easiest is to find out if they ever eat pork or shellfish, or mix two different fabrics together. Those are also banned by the Bible, but very few people pay attention to those issues.

Secondly, let me give you two other Bible quotes. Matthew 7:1-3. “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

That's the King James version. I may not be especially religious, but I've always preferred the poetry of that language.

Here's an even better verse, though. Mark 12:29-31. “The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.”

Seems pretty plain to me. (Even if King James thought "there is none other commandment" was proper sentence structure...) Like I said, I'm not all that religious. But if you're going to claim to be a Christian, shouldn't you pull the rules for your life from the New Testament instead of the old one? Otherwise, you should just convert to Judaism.

But the military has fallen fully in line with the bad Christians who make up the "Religious Right," and the ban on gays in the military is fully in effect. I actually had a briefing from the Legal Office a few years before I retired (shortly after Dubya was elected), where the military lawyer tried to explain that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Pursue" was not official military policy. But, you don't ask somebody what his sexual preference was, and if they don't tell you that they're gay, then you don't go after them to find out if they're gay.

I'm serious. He was doing his best Scotty McClellan, trying to tell us that, although "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Pursue" was not policy, you still weren't allowed to ask or pursue, and the homosexuals who didn't tell would be just fine. Honest.

And what has this led to? What we have, just under a month ago, is seven members of the 82nd Airborne, one of the Army’s most elite units (no, really, “most elite” makes sense. It does. It just seems redundant because you don’t think like the military does. See, they took the phrase “elite unit,” and instead of it being descriptive – “elite” – of the group of people – “unit” – they drained all of the meaning out of it, so that “elite unit” is now a philosophical construction, and the best of the people in that group… oh, never mind. Just trust me, they understand it)…

Where was I again?

Oh, right. Anyway, what we have is seven members of the 82nd Airborne, a group of Special Forces paratroopers (I really want to go off on a tangent about “special education,” but I’m too easily distracted anyway) are getting kicked out of the military for making videos that were simultaneously both pornographic and homosexual.

Now, let’s be real for a second. If these guys can still fight and kill, what excuse is there for kicking them out of the Special Forces? After all, they proved that they can work as a team, right? But the military has this stupid prejudice against homosexuality, which probably stems from the fact that they’re pretty heavily repressed themselves.

I mean, look at them. Big leather boots, polished like mirrors... crisp, starched uniforms... berets perched on their closely-shaven skulls... working out all the time, so they’re obviously fixated on the male physique... Come on! It’s like they’re auditioning for the Village People twenty-four hours a day.

And because of this extreme self-loathing, the military has to kick out anyone who brings out a PING on their gaydar. Even if it means that they have to kick out every Arabic translator right before they invade an Arabic-speaking country, they aren’t going to let things like logic get in the way of their prejudice.

(In case you’re curious, they get around this little problem through the all-American habit of “out-sourcing.” When I was in Iraq, all of the translators I met, outside of a few locals hired as secretaries and the like, were contractors, hired at ten or twenty times the price of keeping the military translator and ignoring his sexual orientation. Makes sense, doesn’t it?)

But despite this hatred of all things gay, somewhere out there is a requisition form that might just include the line “Videotape, homosexual, one each.” Because… well, we’ll just let the news article speak for itself.

Military interrogators posing as FBI agents at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, wrapped terrorism suspects in an Israeli flag and forced them to watch homosexual pornography under strobe lights during interrogation sessions that lasted as long as 18 hours, according to one of a batch of FBI memos released Thursday.

That’s right. They set up an S&M disco in Guantanamo. And think about it for a minute. Somebody had to actually audition the videos. Somewhere out there, some colonel had a big stack of movies, probably smoking a big cigar (because, after all, sometimes a cigar isn’t just a cigar…), saying things like “Nope. Not gay enough. Next!”

And he had to watch them all the way through, right? You’ve got to make sure that it’s gay from top to bottom (so to speak). You can’t let any straight sex scenes sneak in, can you? Wouldn’t that ruin the effect of the movie?

And those prejudices can pop up in a number of places. Here's a question for you. It almost seems like it isn't related, but if you think about it for a while, maybe you'll see that it is. Because Hollywood has taken a number of hits lately from the right wing about how liberal they are. So did they cave in to pressure?

If a man is given the Best Director award, wouldn't you think that the only movie that he directed that year, a product of his vision and a tribute to his directing talents, would be the best film that year? Especially if the script is the "Best Adapted Screenplay?" (Not to mention that it had the "Best Original Score"...) Doesn't that seem to follow? So, we have Ang Lee, the Best Director, using the Best Screenplay (that was taken from another source), and setting it against the Best Original Music out there. But despite that, his film Brokeback Mountain was not the Best Picture?

It's just a thought.