The Blog From Another Dimension: Media Reviews Archives

Dynamite Warrior

I just thought I might mention this, purely out of a sense of the weirdness of it. A new movie trailer on Apple's trailer site, called "Dynamite Warrior." First, this bit appears in the description of the trailer:

A supernatural, action packed movie with high-grade special effects and the kind of raw action scenes the world is coming to expect from Thailand.

Um, okay... I didn't really expect that much out of Thai movies, but... Justin, any comments?

However, the description get weirder:

...the killer is in fact a warlock of immense power, a nearly invincible mystical man who is trying to control the whole village. His one weakness? He can be harmed only by weapons that have been treated with the menstrual blood of a young virgin.

It's at that point that I essentially said, "okay, I'm outta here." Those wacky Thais. You'd think they'd give older virgins a chance.

Seriously, though, if the trailer is any indication, there don't seem to be any "high grade" special effects, or even any special effects that I can make out. Just a bunch of choreographed martial arts moves based on ridiculous extremes, with flying objects on wires. Not nearly as impressive as most of the stuff that's out there. Which makes this just weird, not even cool-special-effects-weird.

Fox "Apologizes"

Here is Fox News' "apology" for "mistakenly" running the "wrong footage" yesterday, showing John Conyers instead of Bill Jefferson.

Several things to note here. First, the statement is so brief and, as Conyers himself put it, lackluster, that it in itself is almost an insult for that reason. If you blinked, you could have missed this statement. In fact, fully half of the statement simply recaps the story about a Democrat being indicted. The "apology" part takes all of five seconds.

Second, such an apology requires a special note to any person who is shown and labeled as corrupt and up on charges, but who is actually innocent. Not mentioning Conyers by name or apologizing directly to him was a grievous insult in itself, as if to say that no one specific was wronged.

Third, such an apology usually focuses on what was wrong about the error, and at least tries to dispel the belief that there was any intention behind it. Fox's statement barely covered this, as one could infer from the word "mistakenly" that they did not intend to show what they did. But a proper apology would at least touch on the easily-inferred racial undertones and stated that such were not intended and no on should take offense. Not that such a statement would be believed, but at least it would be proper.

Fourth, the briefest possible "explanation," that the footage was shown "mistakenly," is hardly an explanation. Normal errors of this type are when footage of an upcoming story is queued up ready to go, and someone in the control room accidentally pushes the wrong button and the video is shown out of sequence with the commentary. However, this "error" was of a completely different order. The Conyers footage was not for any pending story. Instead, the Conyers footage had to be retrieved from archives where it by practice is carefully labeled and notated, and then reviewed and edited manually to select the appropriate small clip to be aired. Which means that either the clip was badly mislabeled and nobody in the review process caught the error (nor in the broadcast itself since it took a full day to note it) or it was not an error at all. And since, from Fox's history and its well-known bias, it is easy to believe that it was an intentional jab at Democrats and blacks, a more detailed explanation and disclaimer was at the very least appropriate.

Of course, the reason for the lack of a real apology here is pretty clear: Fox would have to admit to... well, to being Fox News. They would have to apologize directly to a Democrat, which would probably cause half the Fox News executive staff to suffer brain hemorrhages. They would have to publicly recognize that something they did was racially offensive, which would dredge up all sorts of equivalent behavior on their part. Or they would at least have had to touch peripherally on the matter that they were either intentionally racist and biased, or that they simply can't tell black people apart. You can bet that on another network, someone--perhaps even the newscaster--would have quickly recognized that it wasn't Jefferson, if not because Conyers is so well-known and recognizable, then because Jefferson would not have been anywhere near Alberto Gonzales. But, yet again, we have to remember: this is Fox News we're talking about.

Update:Fox apparently--and quite surprisingly--realized that their first apology was completely unacceptable, and does it again--this time a lot more properly. They still don't touch on the color issue, but they do make a big deal of the fact that they put Conyers in Jefferson's place.

As a side note, YouTube has just made it a lot easier to embed their videos when viewed on a non-YouTube site. They added some Javascript goodies that allow for choosing related videos in a very Mac-Dock-like fashion, and at the end, an easy-to-use copy-the-url-or-embedded-code feature. Very nice. In the past, I had to click the "share" button, then change the URL from "share" to "watch," and then grab the embedded code from there. This is much easier.

Context

Truth be told, I'm not a fan of Al Sharpton, and never really was since I fist heard of him in relation to the Tawana Brawley case. Some liberals and some libertarians seem to like him, say that he's good at bringing up topics that should be brought up, and/or see him as a constructive spoiler in political campaigns and debates. I don't see that myself. I don't dislike the guy that much, but I'm certainly no follower, and have little reason to defend the guy.

And if I thought that Sharpton really had said something to the effect that Romney or Mormons in general did not "really believe in God," I would be alongside the people condemning him for the remark. I certainly do not feel that Christians are always respectful of people with differing beliefs, and would have little trouble believing that one mainstream Christian said that about a Mormon. In fact, I think Romney's biggest obstacle in this election will be the fact that the majority of Republican voters tend to be strongly non-Mormon Christians.

If Sharpton had a history of bigoted statements, towards Mormons or any other religious group, I would also be suspicious of what he said recently.

The thing is, I don't think the claim holds up that Sharpton was talking about Mormons.

Sharpton said: "...and as for the one Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him anyways, so don't worry about that; that's a temporary situation."

Out of context, it certainly sounds like Sharpton was saying that Romney and/or Mormons don't believe in God. However, context is everything. Sharpton was debating an atheist, and it is absolutely believable that Sharpton was telling Hitchens--the atheist--that people who really believe in God as opposed to atheists would defeat Romney. Not people who believe in God as opposed to Mormons.

Now, especially out of context, the statement could be taken either way; the thing is, in the context of a debate with an atheist, it makes far more sense that Sharpton was talking about atheists being the ones who don't really believe in God--else one would have to believe that Sharpton has suddenly turned into a massive anti-Mormon bigot with no history to suggest that.

The thing is, most stories I am seeing so far in the media don't even mention that he was debating an atheist. Take this one, an ABC affiliate. Yes, it's in Mormon country, but even then, to exclude the entire context of debate with an atheist is equivalent to outright lying. And of course, conservative blogs, Fox News, and the Romney campaign have started running with the story and are busily establishing their version of events. Lou Dobbs had Hitchens on, but again, showed only the clipped statement--even muted the audio of the previous statement in showing the clip--and then had his debate opponent comment on it, which he did as a means of expressing disdain for religious groups.

Like Gore's statement about "taking the initiative in creating the Internet," or Bill Clinton's "I didn't inhale" statement, there are two ways to read it--the way that makes perfect sense in context, and the way that makes the speaker sound like an utter buffoon. This is the same situation: taking the statement in the context of a debate with an atheist, Sharpton was almost certainly not dissing Mormons. But if you want to make it sound sensational, it is very easy to spin the statement the other way.

But I have noticed another problem: nobody is providing the context of the whole dialog between Sharpton and Hitchens. I have looked solidly on Google, both in news and on web sites, and not a single one of them show (a) the statement that Sharpton was responding to--incredibly vital in order to understand the nature of his reply--nor did they (b) even include all of Sharpton's statement. They cut in with Sharpton saying "...and as the one Mormon..." and many of the quotes dishonestly cut out the "and," leave no ellipses to show that it was a continuation of a prior utterance, improperly capitalize the start of the second clause of his statement, and do not show what came before.

This is incredibly dishonest, and inexcusable that news outlets--supposedly objective--should cut it like that. For all I know, the words before that statement were exculpatory, or even more damning. But leaving them out--and in many cases, acting like they didn't exist--makes it impossible to understand fully. It certainly makes it seem even more like Sharpton was indeed saying something else, but that including the prior utterance would lessen the sensational impact of the story. All that I can say is that within the context of debating an atheist, what has been quoted so far makes perfect sense--albeit awkward wording--in the way Sharpton is still insisting that he meant it.

Like I said, I have no great love for Sharpton, and if the full story indeed shows he was making a bigoted statement against Mormons, I'll be right up there condemning him. But with the facts that are out now, that does not seem to be the case, and with the full context still being held back, that's the only honest way of reading it.

I am also somewhat disappointed that, at least so far, the major liberal blogs are completely ignoring the matter. Perhaps they are waiting for a full transcript, perhaps they just don't want to touch it. But it seems to me that what has been shown so far is enough to make the point I myself have made.

If anyone can point me to a transcript of the debate with the full Sharpton quote and the statements preceding it, I would appreciate the heads-up.

Spiderman 3

Well, I got an unusual chance yesterday--to see a movie here in Japan at about the same time it starts showing in the U.S.--in fact, the public sneak previews started even earlier here, but I wanted to go see the film with Sachi. We were able to get good seats because I had visited the theater the day before and got seat assignments--something which only Toho and Warner/Mycal theaters let you do in Japan without extra charge, I think. Strangely, although you can buy your tickets online from those places, they won't let you get a specific seat--they only allow you to choose a general section of the theater.

In any case, the movie. Super-short summary: not great, but a fair action flick. Slightly longer review: in order to watch this movie, make sure you have set your critical faculties aside and are in full disbelief-suspension mode--even for a fantasy-villain super-hero movie. That goes not just for the mode of how villains are created, but also for personal interactions between the characters. It's kind of like an incredibly well-budgeted special-effects extravaganza written by someone who couldn't figure out how to get from A to C so they kind of fudged on B all the time. You start at scene A, which is good, and you arrive at the payoff scene C, which is better; but scene B leaves you shaking your head.

Another problem with the film is villain overload. There are three villains in the movie--or four, depending on how you count them. Hell, even five, in a sense. They do wrap things up fairly (though not perfectly) neatly at the end, but at times you get a bit tired of yet another villain arriving to molest Spidey. It also seems to be an increasing trend: in the first Spiderman, there was one villain; in the second, two. God knows what they have planned for a potential fourth film.

Another quality this film picked up from the second film in the series is the drag-them-down-to-bring-them-up technique of storytelling, except this time they applied it to both Peter Parker and MJ. As the film starts, MJ has a starring role in a broadway musical, and Peter is madly in love with her, getting ready to propose. So, you know things are going to disintegrate. And, of course, that at some point, MJ will be grabbed by the villains and Peter/Spidey will have to rescue her. Don't worry, I am not giving anything away here, just like I would not be giving anything away to say that in Die Hard 4, there will be highly improbable car chases, stunts, and explosions. It's established formula by now.

Once you get past all of that, there is some good movie there. As usual for the Spiderman series, the human element of the story is pretty strongly emphasized--the relationships between characters, and the principles of morality involved. But let's face it: when you go to see a film like Spiderman 3, you go for the action and special effects. And there's a fairly good amount of that in this film. The nature of the villains and their modes of transport assure it. The flying scenes between Spiderman and Harry or Venom tend to fly by so fast, with so much happening, that it's almost impossible to take in what's going on; they seemed to crank the speed of these up to the maximum, testing the limits. The Sandman effects were fairly impressive, and are probably where a fair amount of the $250 million budget went to--but in the end, you have to wonder if it was really necessary to spend that much to get this film.

If you're into Spiderman or just enjoy super-hero action films, this'll be worth watching. If not, then not so much; it might be good light fare, but you might want to wait for the film to reach a lower-priced venue to see it.

As I have noted before, American movies often premier late in Japan; Spiderman 3 is an exception. Here's a list of upcoming movies and when they open. A few open within a few weeks of the US release, but more open more than a month later, with a few coming many months late:

Shrek the Third: USA, May 18; Japan, June 30
Pirates of the Caribbean 3: USA, May 19; Japan, May 25
Ocean's 13: USA, June 8; Japan, August 11
Surf's Up: USA, June 8; Japan, January 12, 2008
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer: USA, June 15; Japan, September 29
Live Free or Die Hard: USA, June 27; Japan, August 4
Ratatouille: USA, June 29; Japan, July 28
Transformers: USA, July 4; Japan, August 4
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: USA, July 13; Japan, July 21

As for films that were already released in the US, 300 comes out in Japan on June 9; Zodiac on June 16; and The Prestige (opened last October in the US), June 9.

The Simpsons Movie, set for a July 27 release in the U.S., doesn't even have a release date for Japan. Neither does Rush Hour 3--which is rather odd, considering how popular Jackie Chan is here.

Getting It Right

I still enjoy watching Bill Maher's "Real Time," but there is one aspect to it that makes it painful to watch sometimes: Maher's lack of preparation. Let's face it, he gets his kudos for being irreverent, not studied on the issues. And because he doesn't seem to prepare much beyond his own immediate talking points, his conservative guests tend to get away with outrageous statements. And sometimes it's not even the preparation which seems thin, but Maher's apparent inability or unwillingness to challenge commonsense contradictions.

For example, on a recent show, one conservative guest discussed the Second Amendment as if it was a fact that it conferred an individual right, in the face of about a century of Supreme Court rulings to the contrary; Maher agreed with the statement instead of challenging it. Yes, Maher is Libertarian, but was arguing for gun controls, and even if he weren't, at the very least one would want the facts of a case observed.

At another point, a right-wing guest got away with saying we should stay in Iraq because when we pulled out of Vietnam, there was massive bloodshed; Maher did not supply the obvious counter-analogy, which was that Vietnam also was not a war we would have won by staying in. Like Iraq, Vietnam would have just dragged on and festered for however many more years we stayed there, and the same bloodshed would have happened when we eventually left anyway. But Maher let this guy's rather outrageous analogy just slip by.

A third issue that Maher let slide was "partial birth abortion," where he was very poorly prepared or just poorly informed, and let the supremely politicized distortions about what "partial birth abortion" is and how it is applied to the issue fly right by--he even said that he had respect for them on the issue of abortion, as if he accepted this extreme wedge issue as representative of the issue as a whole.

Sometimes there will be a liberal guest on the show who will set the record straight instead, but the third guest who would otherwise have balanced the two heavy conservatives was a Democratic governor from a red state--in other words, a conservative Democrat who had something to lose by taking the liberal position on any of the issues mentioned. So he didn't really act as a counter to them at all.

The thing is, the other guests shouldn't have to do this. Maher brought up all the issues I listed above, and so he should have at least had a staff flunky do some basic research and give him some crib notes. But almost every time, Maher seems to come to the moderator's table with little more than what he skimmed from the newspaper. For a person leading what is essentially a debate, Maher does not seem to prepare at all for that debate, and that can be frustrating sometimes. I very much enjoy the show, even when I disagree with Maher and/or his guests, but to have such complete fiction spouted and not challenged when even a half-assed attempt at preparation would have sufficed to stem that sort of thing....

It's the kind of show where I can get worked up about a thing, and even pause the playback to debate the point as if I were there. Which is not good, really--there's no point in me doing so, but it helps relieve the frustration. A pity, it's otherwise a good show, but this flaw often makes me think twice about watching.

No Fox Debate in Nevada

This was really a no-brainer from the start, and why Nevada Democrats ever agreed to a Fox News-sponsored debate in the first place is beyond comprehension. After all, can you imagine Republicans agreeing to put McCain, Giuliani and Romney in a debate hosted by Air America and featuring Al Franken, Randy Rhodes, and Jesse Jackson? Even if Ann Coulter were thrown in as a token conservative? Somehow I don't think so.

Fox attempted to sidetrack the boycott by offering to "co-host" with an Air America affiliate, but it was soon made clear that they would still control the debate, with a panel of Fox personalities joined by a single Air America questioner. The format would be clear: Fox would make their best attempt to focus the "debate" on smears of the candidates, try to pit them against each other with accusations and dirt, and then wind up the farce by having a post-debate show talking about how stupid and lame all the candidates were. Yeah, Democrats should be happy to participate in that, and boycotting it was a real blow to "balanced" reporting, proving that a Democrat should not be elected because they're all "afraid of journalists," "only appear on those networks and venues that give them favorable coverage," as Ailes put it. Which, of course, describes the Bush administration to a tee.

But when Nevada Democrats somehow agreed to such a bargain, they were immediately castigated by the bloggers and others as having made a huge blunder--and because it would look bad if they suddenly retreated under such criticism, they had to wait for some other excuse to back out of the debate. And Fox News being what it is, they didn't have to wait long before they got their excuse. It came in the form of Roger Ailes, president of Fox News, making jokes which compared Barrack Obama and Osama bin Laden.

Ailes' remarks are particularly interesting because he had just scolded Democrats for the rumored boycott of the debates, saying among other things, "We’re headed into covering a tough political season, and all of us will be called upon to do our best and be fair."

And then just hours later, he said, "It is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, 'Why can’t we catch this guy?'"

Not that this was the first such biased comment by Ailes or the most outrageous. And yet, somehow he sees this as being "fair."

I'd hate to see what his idea of "biased" is.

Crazy Dreamer

The Simpsons isn't out of good stuff yet. This week's was another of their musical episodes, which I usually don't enjoy--but it had one of the best one-liners I've ever heard on a TV show.

For those who don't like the spoilers, it's below the fold.

Bart, speaking to his psychologist:

And then I had this dream that my whole family was just cartoon characters and that our success had led to some crazy propaganda network called Fox News!

Finally: WKRP on DVD

For a long time, WKRP in Cincinnati was a notable exception to all the TV shows being put on DVD. You kind of had to wonder why that was, seeing as how so much money could be made off of it. The answer: the RIAA. Original episodes of KRP had popular music in them, often inseparably from the dialog as Johnny or Venus would introduce a song. The problem came when the music labels started asking exorbitant piles of money to approve their rebroadcast--and so they had the owners of WKRP by the cajones. No music, no show. Many of the original episodes were shown in syndication, with non-licensed music dubbed in place of the big hits.

Well, apparently they worked something out, because the first season of WKRP (click-through to Amazon) is finally coming out on DVD on April 24th. It will have 22 episodes, some extra features (commentaries on two episodes with Hugh Wilson, Loni Anderson, Frank Bonner, & Tim Reid, plus three featurettes), and will cost $26. From what's been reported, the studio wasn't able to work out everything with the music labels, and so there will be music substitutions that fit the episodes. But no problem there--the little 5-second snippets we heard in the original episodes are not what made the show really good, anyway.

Published! ...Sort Of

About nine months ago, I got contacted by a professor at a college in Texas who was putting together an anthology of readings for college writing classes, asking if he could publish one of my blog posts in his book. Duly flattered and all big-headed about it, I agreed, on the condition that I get a desk copy in return for my magnanimity.

The post, by the way, is Arguing on the Internet, from December 2005. You can read it here, for free! How about that!

Well, it seems like half the bargain has played out. Last I heard from the permissions coordinator in August, the book had been sent to the publisher a bit later than expected, and the July publication date had been set back a little. After that, I just forgot about the whole thing until tonight, when a re-sorting of my inbox brought one of the old emails into view. I started to write a letter back to them asking what had become of the whole thing, when I thought of doing a search on the web, and bingo--got an instant hit.

The book, as it turns out, was published last September. Guess they were a bit too busy to remember to send me my desk copy (of course, I have just now sent them a gentle reminder of the agreement).

In one sense, this is kind of cool. When I started this blog, I certainly did not expect anything I wrote here to wind up in a college textbook. And, as the author pointed out when he was asking for my permission to print, I am in the very same chapter (Chapter One!) as George Orwell, George Lakoff, and Deborah Tannen. I am the closing act, in fact! Wow! And I'm sure that I deserve to be in such company, and that the author was not just trying to stroke my ego!

In a slightly more realistic light, I'm still a dweeb with a blog who wrote a post that a community college professor in Houston figured he'd fill out a new anthology with.

But, still, George Orwell!

Buy it via this link (you know you want to!) and I get a cut. (Through my Amazon Associates account, not any deal with the publisher.) But for some strange reason, the US Amazon store does not list the table of contents (and therefore not my own name! Bastards!). The Canadian Amazon store does, however. Yet another way to Google me.

I'm sure the book and movie deals will start pouring through the door after this. Any day now.

Raiders of the DaVinci Code

One story in the press this week is about the supposed discovery of the tombs of Jesus, Mary Magdalena, and their conjectured son Judah. Behind it are the "Exodus Code" producers Simcha Jacobovici and James Cameron.

From what I understand, the tombs will be opened on live TV, whereupon ghostly apparitions will fly out, and James Cameron's face will melt while Jacobovici's head will explode.

Seriously, what the hell is with Cameron? He used to make awesome films. I guess he got all the money he needed after Titanic, and can do whatever the hell he wants now. I can understand why he went on a decade-long kick on deep-sea submersibles and just made documentaries about Titanic and related subjects--the guy probably just loved doing it and figured he'd focus on that.

But now Cameron seems to be behind a new string of Christian-themed movies-of-the-month, becoming a new huckster for cheap religion-masquerading-as-science crapola. A new hobby I can understand, but a Bible fetish and spurious claims of having proven the Red Sea parting or finding Jesus' tomb... that's straying well into wacko territory.

What happened, did a cult get their hands on him or something?

Macrovision's Statement on DRM

Steve Job's polemic on DRM drew many responses, but they're essentially all the same: full of hot air and horse manure. As a representative sample, here's the one from Fred Amoroso, CEO & President of Macrovision, a company that specializes in the production of DRM schemes:

DRM is broader than just music --
While your thoughts are seemingly directed solely to the music industry, the fact is that DRM also has a broad impact across many different forms of content and across many media devices. Therefore, the discussion should not be limited to just music.

He's right. DRM should be removed from all media, not just music. DVD region encoding, for example, is in place for no other reason than to defeat the open marketplace and gouge customers in each region for as much as they can be shaken down for. And Jobs' argument applies equally well to all DRM: it can be and regularly is broken, and so DRM, in every form, does nothing but hobble honest, paying customers so that the companies applying the DRM can cheat them. The entire argument that DRM has anything at all to do with piracy is bunk--it is clearly and simply about controlling media after a customer has bought it so that the paying customer must pay the highest price possible, and pay that price again and again for the same media.

DRM increases not decreases consumer value --
I believe that most piracy occurs because the technology available today has not yet been widely deployed to make DRM-protected legitimate content as easily accessible and convenient as unprotected illegitimate content is to consumers. The solution is to accelerate the deployment of convenient DRM-protected distribution channels—not to abandon them.

This is just one of the many places in this argument where Macrovision's bias as a DRM-producing company shows through. The point Jobs made, the point which is absolutely and glaringly true and real, is that DRM will never work. So long as there is a clear picture and clear sound output at one end, pirates will always find a way around whatever DRM scheme is thrown at them. Macrovision just wants to get the perpetual contracts to make yet another DRM scheme when each successive one is defeated.

Without a reasonable, consistent and transparent DRM we will only delay consumers in receiving premium content in the home, in the way they want it.

There's a bald-faced lie if there ever was one. The way customers want it is without DRM. What Amoroso is saying here is supposedly that DRM can allow a customer to choose between delivery systems and viewing devices. What he really means is that without DRM, a customer would actually be able to view media without restrictions--i.e., you buy it, you own it--and that's the last thing Macrovision or the media producers want. They want to charge the customer for the same media again and again and again, as many times as they can. Pay once for viewing over cable, again for renting, again for buying to watch on TV, again for buying to watch on your iPod, and so forth and so on.

Abandoning DRM now will unnecessarily doom all consumers to a "one size fits all" situation that will increase costs for many of them.

Yeah, customers would really hate owning something outright after paying for it, without restrictions about how how and where and how often they can play it. That would suck. What Amoroso is probably talking about, however, is the idea that without DRM, one high price would have to be paid instead of many small prices. Which, of course, is BS. It all tracks back to the idea that somehow media can't be made available without DRM--that if even one version is free and clear, it will ruin all other sales. But since most media is sold without DRM, and all DRM is breakable, and yet the media producers are still making many, many billions in a lucrative business, that's clearly bull.

Besides which, it does not mean that DRM must be universally applied. Want to DRM a rental movie which is only intended to play 2 or 3 times? Fine. If I rent it, then I don't own it, so DRM away; I don't expect rental material to be permanent, or else I would wonder why NetFlix wanted their DVD back. You think that DRM is necessary for the subscription music services, where people pay for access and not ownership? Again, fine--if ownership stays in your hands, you may DRM till the cows come home. But if I pay to own the media, then keep your grubby little DRM paws off of it, thank you very much. I just paid your highest price, the "one size fits all," and now it's mine.

In fact, Amoroso's statement itself suggests that the highest price to be paid deserves no DRM. The "one price fits all" he mentioned must be the highest possible price, and that price is for outright ownership--and Amoroso said plainly that such a price would be tied to "abandoning DRM." Thanks, Fred! You just made Steve Jobs' case for him.

DRM will increase electronic distribution--

... Quite simply, if the owners of high-value video entertainment are asked to enter, or stay in a digital world that is free of DRM, without protection for their content, then there will be no reason for them to enter, or to stay if they've already entered. The risk will be too great.

You mean like every single movie and TV show now made, which are all transferred eagerly to DVDs which have either no DRM, or DRM that is so easy to break that there is no practical difference? What horse crap. All music and all video is already in a DRM-free world, in that every single piece of media can be separated from DRM easily and effortlessly by pirates, which is supposed to be the whole purpose of DRM, right? And yet all these media producers just can't wait to release their material because of the immense profits waiting for them despite the "devastating" effect of piracy (which, of course, is little or no effect at all).

In short, adding DRM will not increase the release of media at all, for the simple reason that all media which can be released, is being released already. You can't increase the amount being released when everything is being released. And with DVD sales now exceeding box office revenues, the suggestion that movie studios would pull out of the DVD market if DRM were not available is so ludicrous as to be laughable.

DRM needs to be interoperable and open –

No need to go over this--the paragraph is simply a swipe at Steve Jobs, daring him to license FairPlay, with the insinuation that he's the one ruining things by running a monopoly.

The rest of the statement is more PR gobbledygook, essentially saying that a reliable and pirate-proof DRM can be achieved (wrong), and the good people at Macrovision are just the people to do it. Blah blah blah.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: DRM has no relation to piracy, zero. It's about shaking down paying customers for more. It's like the guy who ties a string around a quarter so that after the vending machine accepts it, he can yank it back out; the content producers want to use DRM as the string around the media they "sell" to you, so that after you pay them for it, they can still yank it back and keep charging you for it.

Good Lord, That's Bad

Here's a video clip from Fox's new show, The 1/2 Hour News Hour. Intended to be the right wing's answer to The Daily Show, you can see that they ripped off the studio design, camera moves, music style, and even the feel of the graphics directly from the Comedy Central show. Unfortunately, they couldn't rip off a good sense of humor or a talented host.

The clip is almost painful to watch. The best gag they have is the name of a magazine for Barack Obama: "BO." That's about as good as it gets. But the bad jokes are not what's painful--it's the laugh track. During the in-studio news desk bits, the laughter comes from a live audience, but it is clearly forced, and sounds angry; for example, when Obama is stuck with a barb, the laughter seems to come mostly from three or four conspicuously loud men in the audience, one of whom shouts, "Yeah!!"

But during the video piece, the laughter is clearly canned. Aside from being very different in quality than the live-audience laughter a few moments before, each burst of laughter sounds nearly identical, and artificially timed. There is also too much effort to shove each joke in your face: in the piece, the "BO" magazine has five gag headlines; if The Daily Show makes such a mock-up, they might mention one or two and then comment on how people taping the show will be able to view the rest. On The 1/2 Hour News Hour, they painfully zoom in on every last one to make sure you don't miss their cleverness, with the canned laughter punctuating each one, turning neatly to applause at the end.

The anchors themselves look like SNL "Weekend Update" rejects, reading their cue-card-driven conversation with less skill than an Academy Awards show presenter. The Daily Show became popular because Jon Stewart has real talent; this show is based rather on sheer political will in the absence of comic talent. And Stewart is not only clever, he also clearly enjoys himself and is open about the gags; the Fox hosts are rigid and posing, taking themselves as seriously as Colbert ironically pretends to. They lack the ability to project that we're all having a good time, and come across more like amateurs reading cue cards with jokes they don't quite get themselves.

As so many are pointing out, this show is not really a comedy show, it is a right-wing political attack show disguised as comedy. The Daily Show combs the news for anything that's funny, and runs with that. They'll go after anything stupid, a key strategy. If the Democrats can bolster their control of Congress and elect a president in 2008, you know that The Daily Show will shift focus onto them, simply because they'll be in the news doing the most stupid stuff--and their liberal-leaning audience will still love the show. This new Fox show simply throws vicious barbs at Democrats; were the Republicans to take over Congress again and get a Republican in the White House in 2008, the show would just scrape deeper and deeper into the crap barrel for something angry to throw at what little there was to say about Democrats. They're not going after anything stupid, they're going after anything liberal. If Jon Stewart took the same strategy in the other direction, he'd fall flat and people would stop watching.

The question now is, will the show were to last for more than a few months. It'll certainly gain the hardcore crowd that loves Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, but it will never gain the much broader audience that Stewart and Colbert enjoy. If it stays on the air for more than just the short time it'll take for people to figure out it sucks, it'll be because Murdoch and Fox are subsidizing it in the hope that one day it'll catch on--like Bill Gates is doing with the Zune.

But just in case you want to see more really bad comedy, here you go.

"Both Sides" Reporting

One meme that has repeatedly emerged in news reporting is the idea of "giving both sides" of a story. If you are willing to presume that any story has two sides (as opposed to one or more than two), then that sounds quite objective and balanced, of course--until you come across a story where one "side" is not only an outright lie, but a demonstrably outright lie. And in the recent age of media manipulation by the right wing, such stories are more numerous than one can count.

However, one such case has surfaced in the past few days, one which is so egregious in its nature that it bears commenting on, even though the source (Fox News) is one that you would naturally expect to bear such falsified witness.

Sean Hannity, of Fox News' Hannity's America, has decided to air at least one of the deleted scenes from ABC's now-infamous right-wing fantasy screed The Path to 9/11.

The scene to be shown is most likely going to be the one where a CIA sharpshooter literally has Osama bin Laden in his sights and requires a "go" order from the White House--and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger is represented as chickening out and denying the team the ability to take the shot. Thus, the Clinton White House was directly responsible for 9/11 and the War on Terror™.

This "event" was completely fabricated, is totally false. It never happened. Former CIA chief George Tenet himself said that the mission referred to never got close to Osama bin Laden; the mission had been scrubbed by Tenet himself a few weeks before it was scheduled because it was considered to have a very low probability of success. Berger was informed of the decision, that being the sum total of his involvement. The 9/11 report did say that "working-level CIA officers were disappointed."

Therefore, the Path to 9/11 scene should have played much differently: a CIA planner wants to go on the mission, but the head of the CIA gets briefed and concludes that it probably won't work, so "he alone" decides to "'turn off' the operation." The CIA planner is unhappy. End of scene. Now, that wouldn't be nearly as dramatic, so the Path to 9/11 writer decides to punch the scene up. Instead of simply planning a mission that has a low probability of success, the mission is on the field and has a 100% chance of immediate success; instead of the CIA chief canceling the mission because it probably wouldn't work, a senior Clinton White House staffer scrubs the mission in a chicken-hearted panic. Yes, that'll certainly punch up the drama!

Later, the movie's writer, Cyrus Nowrasteh, admitted to "improvising" the scene. "Improvising," in this case, meaning that it was rewritten in a way that made it a virtually complete fabrication, indicting real people of having made catastrophically stupid miscalculations that were complete and utter fiction.

In short, it was a lie.

Enter Fox News. (Or, as Olbermann more accurately calls it, "Fox Noise.") John Finley, producer of Hannity's America, believes that the story has merit as "news"; according to a Fox News attorney, despite Fox not having the required permission from ABC to air the scene, "officials there believed that the newsworthiness of the material put it under the fair-use exception to the copyright statute."

But what really merits attention is a statement by Finley:

We here at Fox — and myself personally — feel the American people deserve both sides.

And that, in a nutshell, pretty much describes the attitude taken by Fox News and a sizable chunk of the whole news media, in how it handles the "both sides" philosophy: even though one side consists of an utter, patent lie, the public deserves to hear that lie presented as if it were a viable, honest "alternate view." Instead of just telling the public the facts and the facts alone, tell them the facts and a big, juicy lie--and then, "let them decide."

Welcome to the 21st-century news media.

Kristol's Shallowness

When Bill Kristol appeared on The Daily Show a few weeks back, Stewart nailed him in a way that seems to have been overlooked, pointing out Kristol's common wingnut double-standard in regarding Bush:

Kristol: Bush has been right about taking the war to them, not letting them come to us, he was right about the fact that with aggressive tactics...

Stewart: So he was, waitwaitwait, I heard a phrase that I hadn't heard, waitwaitwait. He was right about...

Kristol: ...the fact that with aggressive tactics on our part we wouldn't be attacked, for the last five years, which is something he deserves some credit for, I think.

Stewart: I disagree.

Kristol: Really?

Stewart: Yeah. I mean, 1993 ...

Kristol: We all thought we would be attacked again...

Stewart: 1993, they bombed the World Trade Center, and they didn't bomb again until, what, 2001. That's what, eight years? So, Clinton needs more credit than Bush, it would seem.

Kristol: Well, they attacked us, unfortunately, they attacked in Africa in 1998...

Stewart: If we're gonna add in attacks in Africa, we gotta go Spain, we gotta go England, and then we gotta say, they actually have attacked us, quite frequently, since...

Kristol: Yeah, and you know, we're in a global war.

I noticed this when it got played last week on the International Edition of The Daily Show, and just got around to looking it up now. You can find a video clip of the of the interview, as always, on C&L here; the part I transcribed above starts at about a quarter of the way into the video.

What surprises me is that when you look at the commentary on the interview, nobody notes that Kristol's argument was completely hypocritical, and that Stewart completely nailed him for it--or that Kristol just shrugged it off, instead of thoughtfully reflecting, "Hey, you're right on that one."... because for right-wingers, there's nothing wrong with that kind of "logic." It's the standard double-standard for Clinton and Bush that right-wingers love; in this case, Bush gets all the credit for no major attacks, but Clinton doesn't because there were overseas embassy attacks in his 8-year stretch of quiet, ignoring all the overseas attacks during Bush's term.

The thing is, how can someone of Kristol's media stature, one of the top-tier conservative intellectuals, get away with such openly sloppy "reasoning"? Unless, of course, everyone simply shrugs it off as Kristol did, and considers it 'par for the course'?

Debunking Fox

Wow. Very rarely does the media go for actually defending a Democratic candidate rather than joining en masse to repeat the smear. Usually the media just gloms on to a lie like this and then goes silent when the truth is made clear.

This time it is a rumor that Barack Obama attended an Islamic Madrassa school, like those in Pakistan, which teach hardcore Islamic hatred of Christianity and the West. The rumor was released by a right-wing site (owned by the Washington Times), which in a double-whammy claimed that the rumor came directly from Hillary Clinton, despite naming no names and producing no documents to back that up. Fox News immediately jumped all over the story, gleefully broadcasting what amounted to a huge smear on both front-running Democratic candidates, and the deepest right-wing elements of the media and blogosphere began their swarm.

As for the Hillary part of the smear, Insight.com is standing by its story, saying that they had direct contact with "researchers connected to Senator Clinton" who said that:

"Ms. Clinton regards Mr. Obama as her most formidable opponent and the biggest obstacle to the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nomination. They said Ms. Clinton has been angered by Mr. Obama's efforts to tap her supporters for donations."

When you consider this, it comes across as the biggest load of crap ever heard. One of the things about Clinton is that she is a savvy political operator, and her campaign doesn't make completely idiotic newbie mistakes. So for her own researchers to go to a right-wing organization, and to say, "hey, tell everyone that Hillary hates Obama and wants to trash him!" is so stupidly and transparently a lie as to be laughable.

This is where organizations like CNN usually chime in with the popular smear, ignoring little details like the one I just mentioned and foregoing things like investigating the truth first. In a turnabout from their usual routine, however, CNN is now savaging the rumor, calling it, accurately for once, a right-wing smear. Wolf Blitzer is even making a big deal about it, saying that "CNN did what any responsible news organization should do," which is investigate the claim. Yeah, as if that's what they have always done. Instead, this time, they actually went to Indonesia, discovered that the school was not a madrassa but instead a normal school where Christianity was taught side-by-side with Islam (but only once a week for both), and that there's nothing subversive or dangerous about anything there--nor was there ever. But CNN didn't stop there, they also went to lengths to show where the smear was coming from; Blitzer repeatedly mentioned Fox and "right-wing" news organizations and blogs as being responsible for spreading the story, and pointed out the connection between the conservative Washington Times and the web site that began the rumor.

Well, better late than never.

Which One Is Different... ?

Here is a sampling of the headlines from major news services reporting on Hillary Clinton's announcement to join the 2008 presidential race:

MSNBC: Clinton voices confidence in her 2008 prospects
CBS: Hillary Clinton Awaits "Great Contest"
ABC: Clinton Confident in Her 2008 Prospects
CNN: Hillary Clinton launches White House bid: 'I'm in'
BBC: Hillary Clinton Joins 2008 Race
NYTimes: Clinton’s Success in Presidential Race Is No Sure Thing
LA Times: Clinton joins 2008 race for president
Boston Globe: Clinton gives her answer to voters: I'm in

And then, the lead Fox News story highlighted on Google News:

Fox News: Fear and Loathing on Sen. Clinton's Trail

The story, actually, is written by someone at RealClear Politics, a right-wing site, and focuses on how Obama will sink a Clinton candidacy, and uses expressions like "discombobulated near-panic" and "liberal candidate" (as opposed to "Democratic candidate").

Nice to see they are so vociferously fighting to maintain their fair and balanced perspective. While they don't seem to be pitching that line too much any more, they still print the slogan, "We report; You decide." Which, in line with its obvious falseness, brings to mind the fact that if they weren't slanting their news so egregiously, they wouldn't have to emphasize the idea that they weren't trying to plant preconceived notions in readers' minds. Kind of like a used car dealer calling himself "Honest Joe's."

Understated Partiality

This from CNN, via Media Matters; CNN correspondent Elaine Quijano spoke on the naming of Bush's new policy:

Democrats are seeking to cast a surge as an escalation of the unpopular Iraq war.

That from within a piece that is otherwise balanced--but this characterization near the beginning of the piece shows either bias or incredibly poor reporting. A reporter should be as unbiased as possible, casting the events reported on in as neutral and objective a light as possible.

With this story, both the words "escalation" and "surge" are political buzzwords; in both cases, politicians are "casting" the proposed policy in a way that sounds favorable to their agenda. But Quijano states the issue in such a way that makes Bush's buzzword sound like the accepted neutral term, while it is the Democrats who are playing politics with language--when in fact, Bush was the first to inject politics into the wording.

An objective reporter would have said this:

Both Republicans and Democrats are seeking to cast the president's new approach to the unpopular Iraq war in ways that suit their interests. President Bush and some Republicans are calling the troop increase a "surge"; Democrats responded by calling it an "escalation."

The thing is, wording like Quijano's very much colors people's perception of who is right and who is wrong, who is serious, and who is playing politics. Since most of the piece is balanced and the bias is subtle enough to slide under most people's radar, it has an even stronger ability to sway opinions than an editorial piece, which many people automatically discount for bias.

Quijano's example of media bias, however, is the kind of thing that goes on all the time. If it were simply a matter of chance, it would favor liberal and conservative interests equally. The thing is, it seems to be quite lopsided in favor of conservative interests--though who knows, maye that's my own bias speaking. But whatever the direction of the tilt, all of us should be alert to and aware of such subtle bias, and be ready to discount for that bias in straight reporting as well as in editorial speech--a boundary, by the way, which is becoming increasingly blurred in today's "news" media.

Backfire

Oops. The RIAA may have made a little tactical error. They did not account for the possibility that some people would not knuckle under to their "legal" extortion and actually fight back in court. But that's what some people are doing, and it is beginning to expose some of the recording industry's trade secrets.

In UMG v. Lindor, the defendants are challenging the RIAA's supposition that when someone pirates a single piece of music on the Internet, the music labels lose $750 and should be compensated accordingly. The legal representatives of Marie Lindor make the counter-argument that "in a proper case, a court may extend its current due process jurisprudence prohibiting grossly excessive punitive jury awards to prohibit the award of statutory damages mandated under the Copyright Act if they are grossly in excess of the actual damages suffered." Seeing as how the RIAA's bottom-level figure of $750 per song is roughly 1000 times the actual maximum loss a music label would suffer in such a case, they argue that $2.80 to $7.00 per song (4 to 10 times the real value, supposing that the defendant would have purchased the song in the first place) is slightly more reasonable. Such punitive damages are far more in line with reality.

However, the big fish that the defendants are after is information on what pricing structure the labels use--how much they make per song, and more revealingly, how they collude to fix prices in the marketplace:

The pricing data really may not be all that secret. Late in 2005, former New York Attorney General (and current Governor) Eliot Spitzer launched an investigation into price fixing by the record labels, alleging collusion between the major labels in their dealings with the online music industry. Gabriel believes that making the pricing information public would "implicate [sic] very real antitrust concerns" as the labels are not supposed to share contract information with one another. ...

[Defense counsel Ray] Beckerman argues in a letter to the judge that the only reason the labels want to keep this information confidential is to "serve their strategic objectives for other cases," which he says does not rise to the legal threshold necessary for a protective order. The proposed order would force the labels to turn over contracts with their 12 largest customers. Most details—such as the identities of the parties—would be kept confidential, but pricing information and volume would not.

That's how to hurt the industry back--show that if they want to extort money from grandfathers and 12-year-old honor students, they risk having their illegal market strategies exposed. The Inquirer puts it a bit more clearly:

This would reveal to the world if any price shenanigans were going on between the RIAA members and could cause them more problems with regulators than it would like.

Already investigations into industry pricing have revealed a Byzantine system of backscratching between record labels and distributors and the last thing the RIAA wants is to have details of this information made public.

If Lindor wins then the most the RIAA would ever be able to charge a pirate in the US will be between $2.80 and $7.00 per song. However the RIAA might also find itself up in front of a Senate inquiry.

Ah, it would be such sweet justice if the RIAA's reign of courtroom terror would end up with them being stuck with punitive damages so reasonable that it would not be worth their while to sue anyone, while at the same time having their own corruption exposed in such a way to get them into real trouble.

I know, it probably won't happen. But in a just world, it would.

Darlene vs. Nancy

Apparently, Darlene and Nancy over at the Associated Press don't cross-check their stories. Both writers took the same AP-AOL poll from mid-December and wrote a story based on it. Here's Nancy's article:

AP poll: Americans optimistic for 2007

By NANCY BENAC, Associated Press Writer
Sat Dec 30, 7:22 PM ET

WASHINGTON - The news from Iraq and other national headlines may be grim, but in Greenville, N.C., John Given has a new baby and his first home, and life is good. [Continued]

The next day, Darlene wrote this:

Poll: Americans see gloom, doom in 2007

By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press Writer
Sun Dec 31, 6:11 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Another terrorist attack, a warmer planet, death and destruction from a natural disaster. These are among Americans' grim predictions for the United States in 2007. [Continued]

Who knows, maybe it was a contrasting-piece set. But neither article references the other. Whatever the case, it most certainly highlights the opinions I've recently written saying that you have to be careful of the press as its members often contradict each other in impossible ways. Of course, I did not expect the same news agency to contradict itself quite so starkly.

Or maybe this is all one of the glass-half-empty, glass-half-full deals.

Of note: the poll claims that 25% "anticipate the second coming of Jesus Christ," and only slightly fewer believe we'll meet E.T. I have to figure that most of those two groups overlap. About half as many people foresee Congress passing a minimum wage hike. So, maybe the entire thing is April Fool's, come four months early. But then again, I am in the optimist's group.

Hat tip to FARK.

Someone at the RIAA Flunked Math

The RIAA has filed a $1.65 trillion (that's right) lawsuit against Russian media download company AllofMP3.com, an outfit that claims that it operates legally under Russian statute--but which charges ridiculously low prices for music. The closest I can place their pricing is that they seem to charge 7 cents for the first minute of music, and 3 cents per minute after that.

Now, clearly, the Russian company is not selling any of this music by any agreement with the copyright holders, and I cannot vouch for the legal justification the firm uses.

All that notwithstanding, exactly what are the idiots are the RIAA thinking in suing this company for $150,000 per song, after 11 million downloads at maybe 15 cents per song? My math may not be the greatest, but it would seem that the RIAA is asking for something along the lines of a million times more than the company has so far brought in--and that's not counting the money they've probably blown on salaries and office supplies and stuff like that already. And something tells me that these people are probably not trillionaires in the first place. They have already responded to the RIAA announcement, claiming that they don't operate in New York and what they do is legal where they are.

But I can tell you one thing that the RIAA has achieved: they have made me aware of this service. And now you. Hmmm. I will have to check out the company and see if it is fly-by-night or anything--for all I know, they are mafia types and your credit card number will be used for nefarious purposes. But if they are not, and better yet, if their service does turn out to be legit and legal via convoluted international copyright and Internet laws, I am going to seriously consider buying all my music from them in the future--for no better reason than to spite the RIAA.

Greedy bastards.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

That's the given title for the last Harry Potter novel. No details on it yet, aside from JK Rowling's statements about writing the novel, including her experience about having an "epic dream" where she was both Harry Potter and the Narrator. That's interesting in that the Harry Potter novels have almost exclusively been told from Harry's standpoint (the exceptions being the first few chapters of the sixth novel only). But then, the dream was more dreamlike than storylike:

The author says: "For years now, people have asked me whether I ever dream that I am 'in' Harry's world.

"The answer was 'no' until a few nights ago, when I had an epic dream in which I was, simultaneously, Harry and the narrator."

She says: "I was searching for a Horcrux in a gigantic, crowded hall which bore no resemblance to the Great Hall as I imagine it."

So far, it seems like she's in the Harry Potter novel...

"As the narrator I knew perfectly well that the Horcrux was jammed in a hidden nook in the fireplace, while as Harry I was searching for it in all kinds of other places, while trying to make the people around me say lines I had pre-arranged for them."

...and we begin to see the author entering the dream. And then:

"Meanwhile waiters and waitresses who work in the real cafe in which I have written huge parts of book seven roamed around me as though on stilts, all of them at last 15ft high."

She adds: "Perhaps I should cut back on the caffeine."

...then it gets to look much more like the frenzied dream of a harried author under a demanding deadline. OK.

Of course, if one wants to read a fully-completed Harry Potter novel series, then read the first five published and then my brother's sixth, seventh--and later, eighth novels to complement Rowling's first five.

Bad News

For Judith Regan. I mean, really. If you're too scummy even for Fox News, then who on Earth would ever hire you? Outside of the RNC, that is.

iMac of the Year

Apple has got to be happy about this:

Image from Mac Daily News; alternate image from TIME here

The use of the iMac is not directly referential to the article; they simply had to use some computer, so they chose an iMac, probably for the simplicity of the appearance--though they over-painted the already-simple front-panel interface with a YouTube screen, used to indicate what you communicate over the World Wide Web. And as happy as I am that an Mac was chosen to represent the everyman's interface with the web, I am even more pleased at the subject matter it represents.

I think that TIME made a fantastic choice here, though in the flowery prose and short storytelling, they do not explain the central point or theme all that well. They did run a story recently which also spoke to the heart of this issue but which also only described it peripherally. Maybe there's an ink-and-paper version, or even an on-line one, which I am not seeing. But they do seem to be making a point here which I fully agree with, even if they are not making it clearly.

This is something of a special point to me, which I have blogged on before, about how the Internet is wonderfully subversive in that it opens up the potential for the individual to communicate to a world audience in a way never before possible. The main point is that before the Internet, communication was controlled by a very few people, a rarified "publishing class" to whom you had to genuflect in order to communicate with more than just a few hundred people in the world. The Internet bypasses the publishing class for the first time in history, and makes it possible for anyone to speak to the world based solely upon the strength of their message.

This is also one of the reasons I favor Network Neutrality so much: it keeps the playing field of communication relatively level and uncensored. Allow the Telecoms to control the Internet, and that becomes hobbled, with the average person's voice suddenly becoming muted and leveraged, potentially even destroying the Internet as the free tool of communication I describe above and instead supplanting that new avenue of social discourse with simply yet another stripe of the publishing class, controlling what you say and taking tolls on yet another controlled and muted road.

Hopefully the Internet will stay what it is; the Democrats taking control of Congress, while not a guarantee, is a very good sign that it will. As such, the Internet is not a perfect answer; it is not a solution to the problem of unequal speech, but it is a step in the right direction. And any public celebration of that aspect of the Internet is something that I gladly welcome.

A Stiff Drink of Bond (Spoiler-free)

I went to see Casino Royale today, and like many others, I was impressed. To me, that's what a Bond film should be more like. Sure, the gadgets, bad puns, cartoon villains, and contrived elaborate death traps can be fun, but hardcore Bond can be so much better. One of the most impressive Bond scenes in the past, for me at least, was the fight between Connery's Bond and Robert Shaw's Donovan Grant in the train compartment in From Russia with Love. The fight came across as very realistic, unlike so many of the cartoonish Bond fights since. And I'm sorry to fans who like Roger Moore, but to me the man was a dreadful Bond, and most of the films with him were little more than bad jokes. Connery was the best, though I think Craig will give him a run for him money; I liked Brosnan best after that, then Timothy Dalton. I don't think there was quite enough of Lazenby to form too much of an opinion, but he scores higher than Moore, of course.

The new Casino Royale is a return to a more serious Bond. Brosnan was pretty good and did come closer with his last Bond movie, but it just wasn't quite good enough, and was still too gimmicky. The unconventional choice of Daniel Craig as 007 and the harsh, hardcore treatment in Royale made the movie less a whiz-bang comic-relief funfest and much more of a realistic, hard-hitting action spy thriller. I hope they keep up with the new/old style; I'd much rather have this than the nonstop one-liners and the wristwatches that can kill a man seven different ways (Now, do pay attention, Bond!).

Past Bonds came across as cool; Craig comes across as cold. Something he even carries somewhat convincingly into the romantic scenes of the film. He is brutal, relentless, and in any other Bond film would have made a more convincing villain than other actors who have taken on such roles. And yet they were able to maintain this cold, hard killer's image without making him unlikable or an asshole; he comes across as safe to anyone not in his way, but you know that he could be ruthlessly brutal to the bad guys. This allows for the character to be much more likeable even as he is made out to be something of an anti-hero. In short, both Daniel Craig and the new way Bond has been written are a success.

The romance is also very well written; this is far more than a woman unconvincingly swooning over Bond simply because he walked in front of her. Eva Green's Vesper Lynd is one of the best Bond women, along with (and in many ways better than) Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies. Hopefully this is not a fluke and the Bond producers have caught on to the idea that strong, serious, intelligent women make Bond films much more enjoyable. Even the disposable bimbo in Royale had more substance than most other Bond girls.

A few small notes: I liked the details that were incorporated into the film. The fractals that were incorporated into the opening sequence were a nice touch, as was the fact that the sequence did not involve the once-normal collage of flying naked women. Virgin Airlines must have had some tie-in (there were, in fact, several incidents of product placement), but I enjoyed catching Sir Richard Branson with his arms out, being searched at at an airport security checkpoint. And I think that it was a good idea to change Baccarat to Poker, despite all the cinema cliches involved. Baccarat has always been a bit too unfamiliar for me to get into it.

My only big complaint for the film, however, is the way you are kept in the dark about so much; you see stuff happening and only find out what it was all about ten or twenty minutes later, by way of someone explaining what happened to someone else--and even then, some things still don't get explained, or at least there are so many small details that I missed a few along the way. You had to go too long without understanding what the hell was going on some times, and then had to work too hard to remember all the events and what significance the explanations have to the story.

Still, it was a great film, and the "Parkour"-style chase sequence at the beginning is one of the better action sequences for a Bond film that I can remember.

Jumping the Shark

There are some authors who, quite frankly, should leave their politics at the door. It seems to me that when an author of popular fiction whose work I tended to enjoy starts injecting their politics in their writing, it usually also happens to be the case that their writing has fallen below a certain level of quality that makes them no longer readable in any case.

Now, don't get me wrong--I am not necessarily suggesting a cause-and-effect relationship. I just happen to notice the two things tend to happen at about the same time. It certainly happened to Tom Clancy. I greatly enjoyed his early books, including The Hunt for Red October, The Cardinal and the Kremlin, The Sum of All Fears, and Without Remorse (which I am re-reading right now). Guy books, certainly, but that describes all of Clancy's books. Debt of Honor is a special case--part of my problem with the book is that I am familiar with Japan, and so most times when Clancy writes about things in Japan, I wince at how horribly wrong he gets so much of the stuff. I could write a long blog post just on that, and maybe I will, if I re-read that book again as well.

But you could see that Clancy was getting stilted with Executive Orders, and by the time he did The Bear and the Dragon, his writing was horrible. And it was with those last two books that Clancy also started preaching politics. Like I said, the two are not connected--Bear was unreadable for so many reasons having nothing to do with the politics, but the politics came right when Clancy was so markedly going downhill. One passage stood out to me from that book, where Ryan was discussing abortion with van Damm. Ryan predicated his argument on this concept:

"Arnie, it's like this. The pro-abortion crowd says that whether or not a fetus is human is beside the point because it's inside a woman's body, and therefore her property to do with as she pleases."

The whole line of reasoning started with that presumption, that abortion rights were based upon the idea of a fetus as property even if the fetus were considered a human life, a predication so absurd as to be laughable; and yet, Ryan's supposedly left-leaning and pro-choice counselor, van Damm, accepts this without challenge.

It's passages like these that can usually turn a book sour for me; for example, my brother gave me a crime novel once called No Lesser Plea. I was already having trouble with the premise, that the state could have a brutal killer dead to rights, and he gets off by throwing a fit in court and then the liberal pansies put him in psychological rehabilitation for a short time and then set him loose on the streets again. I stopped reading altogether when the author described a court-appointed psychologist thusly: "He considered himself a liberal, in that he believed that when black people were violent and committed crimes it was not really their fault." The abortion passage in Bear did not turn me off from the whole book like that line in Plea, but it sure didn't help.

I tried reading Rainbow Six, the next Clancy book after Bear, thinking Clancy may have come back into form, but it was just as bad if not worse. The contrived opening had members of an elite squad of counter-terrorism agents taking a commercial flight--which then just happens to get hijacked! Sure!

Now I'm seeing the same kind of thing happening again, this time with a different author. Orson Scott Card has been highly controversial outside his writing, but as long as that kind of thing stays separate, I am able to enjoy the fiction without the person's politics interfering--else I would never be able to enjoy a movie featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, or Mel Gibson. And three of Card's works remain my favorites: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Pastwatch. In his public persona, Card has been something of an asswipe. Despite claiming to be a Democrat and saying he has nothing against gays, he nevertheless has advocated that "laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books" and that gays "cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens" within a society with certain sexual mores. He has also been a rather vociferous and outspoken advocate of George W. Bush, the war in Iraq, and the whole "War on Terror" paradigm; just a few weeks ago, before the midterm elections, he wrote this:

There is only one issue in this election that will matter five or ten years from now, and that's the War on Terror....I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America's role as a light among nations. But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war.

Card is also pro-life, believes a right to privacy does not legally exist, and believes that the Democratic Party is "self-destructive," "extremist-dominated," and "insane." He lauds Fox News and urges everyone to vote Republican. But he says he's a Democrat because he is pro-gun-control and is critical of free-market capitalism and southern racism.

It goes without saying that venturing into Card's politics is, to say the least, an ugly, sticky affair. But in the past, much of his fiction has been superlative (not all of it, to be sure). A lot of people didn't like Speaker for the Dead as much as I did, but Ender and Pastwatch tend to be greatly popular, and I certainly can read them again and again--but only in the way that I can still read the early Clancy novels. For some time, however, Card's writing has been sliding (his Bean-centered Ender books marked this slide), and now it seems that Card is officially jumping his own literary shark with his new book, Empire.

The plot: a terrorist attack which kills the president and vice-president touches off a new American civil war when blue-state liberals declare New York the capital and claim control of the country. You can read the first five chapters on Card's site (a usual preview he does for his new books). The politics surge in with Chapter Two, in which we meet a conceited, snotty, East-coast Ivy-League liberal who preaches the virtues of Empire over a Republic and acts all condescending to the reasonable, intelligent veteran whom he calls "Soldier Boy." The conservative hero sees the liberal student body as:

...ignorant of any real-world data that didn't fit their preconceived notions. And even those who tried to remain genuinely open-minded simply did not realize the magnitude of the lies they had been told about history, about values, about religion, about everything. So they took the facts of history and averaged them with the dogmas of the leftist university professors and thought that the truth lay somewhere in the middle.

Card does something even more manipulative, which is to make the right-wing protagonist appear to be questioning his own worldview, and, of course, concluding logically and objectively that he is in fact correct to be conservative. The presence of such soul-searching simply marks Card's realization that the reader will question Card's bias, so Card inserts the language to try to make it seem like it has been reasoned out--but it comes across as just as self-serving as Clancy's taking both "sides" of the abortion debate, with a right-wing author using a falsely "objective" device to validate a biased view.

Card's adulation of Bush is clear:

Truth to tell, this President had changed things. Without ever getting a bit of credit for it, he had transformed the military from the cripple it had been when he took office into the robust force with new doctrines that had the enemies of the United States on the run.

I could go into detail in knocking over this fantasy, but I think you know the fallacies here as well as I do. (Trust me, I could go into a long rant here about how Bush has decimated our military capability in a war completely divorced from terrorism, but to go into more detail would detour too long from the present topic.) In any case, that passage begins Chapter Four, which describes the terrorist attack--in detail which is as bizarre as it is beyond one's ability to suspend disbelief. From there:

...a radical leftist army calling itself the Progressive Restoration takes over New York City and declares itself the rightful government of the United States. Other blue states officially recognize the legitimacy of the group, thus starting a second civil war.

Interestingly, the Publisher's Weekly review on the Amazon.com page for the novel (the source of the above synopsis) rather flatly pans the book, saying that "right-wing rhetoric trumps the logic of story and character," and "the action is overshadowed by the novel's polemical message." But I guess that Amazon prints their reviews automatically, good or bad (some of the other reviews are good, which is surprising, as the first chapters--not to mention the plot--are so abysmally bad.

Maybe Clancy and Card are exceptions, and the seepage of personal politics into writing is not a sign of an author going downhill. But within the miniature statistical universe of these two writers, it's certainly no question that the two events coincided.

Update: I just remembered that Michael Crichton might be a member of the club, though I think his drop-off in writing quality came somewhat before his anti-environmentalist polemic.

Fox's Daily Show Wannabe

Fox is making noises about creating its own Daily Show style comedy show for conservatives. Lamenting that Comedy Central's Daily Show and Colbert Report are left-leaning, Joel Surnow (co-creator of 24 and the creative force behind the new show) said, "The other side hasn't been skewered in a fair and balanced way." Isn't that interesting--someone from within Fox News lamenting that others aren't "fair and balanced." I'm glad I had my irony sensors off when I read that, I don't like replacing them after they've been burnt out from overload.

This should be interesting, though; one thing I have noticed is that good-quality right-wing entertainment, especially comedy, is rare to non-existent. It'll be interesting to see if it can be done successfully without seeming shrill, and if they will include skewering of the right as well, just as The Daily Show will skewer left-wing politicians should they make the news.

One also has to wonder if this show would have been given the go-ahead if the Dems had not taken control of Congress. Anything that happens on Fox News, after all, does not happen without a political agenda.

Old Shows, New Shows

Well, the alien-invasion-style series have all died off, it seems. Threshold was the first to go (formulaic, but interesting). Invasion died off next (too soap-operaish for my tastes). And Surface (very promising, at least it was) seems to have quietly passed away, without even word of its cancellation, as far as I can find at least. Its star, Lake Bell, is back on Boston Legal. At least The 4400 is still around, even though it runs only 13 or 14 hours per year.

The West Wing finished its run last year, and Commander in Chief died in the cradle (rightly so--it could have been very good, but was very poorly written). CinC might actually come back for a TV movie sendoff next year, though. Stargate SG-1 will end after the current season, after ten years on the air. And despite its promise, Rome seems to have been a one-shot, unless HBO is going for a very long-delayed second season.

In the meantime, I have found some other new series, ranging from the very iffy to the good enough to watch.

Torchwood is the latest, just having premiered. A British series, it's a spin-off of the most recent Doctor Who. It takes from several Doctor Who episodes over the past two years. The lead male character, Captain Jack Harkness, was introduced in the 2005 Doctor Who two-parter, The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances; he was introduced as an American time traveling mercenary, last seen in WWII (an appearance which is referenced to in the premier). He is presented in Torchwood as an immortal being of sorts with a mysterious past. The name "Torchwood" comes from the Doctor Who episode Tooth and Claw, where Rose and the Doctor meet with a not-amused Queen Victoria at the Torchwood estate; when Victoria sees the Doctor as a danger, she establishes Torchwood as an institute to collect extra-normal evidence and technology--an institute which shows up in the second-season two-part finale, Army of Ghosts and Doomsday, where Torchwood is presented as a highly advanced super-secret agency with all the latest in alien tech.

The series Torchwood establishes that there are different branches of the institute, the one we encounter consisting of just five people, led by Captain Jack; their digs are dingy and dungeonesque, in stark contrast to the modern high-rise fortress shown in Doctor Who. But the goofy alien technology is very Doctor Who-ish. The main character of the new series is Gwen Cooper, a constable who gets drawn into Torchwood as a newbie and has to learn the ropes.

The show has the same entertaining edginess of the new Who, and shows promise; I'll keep my eyes on this one.

Next newest is Heroes, which is sort of a TV rip-off of X-Men with a smattering of The 4400 (also derivative of X-Men). Just like X-Men, Heroes has humans evolving super powers, a different superpower for each mutant. A central character is Mohinder Suresh, a non-mutant (so far as we know) scientist from India whose father was onto the whole mutation thing, but got killed by forces unknown. The father might not actually be dead--one photo of him was shown, and it was Erick Avari--a character actor (from the Stargate movie and TV shows, and countless TV appearances) of enough note to not just be limited to a photo reference (IMDB actually has him listed as guest-starring in three upcoming episodes). There is also a mystery agent going around collecting the mutants and doing... something with them--and discovers his daughter is a mutant. She's a cheerleader who can't be killed, despite fatal falls, running into a burning train wreck, and having a tree branch impale her skull. The last gets her dead only long enough for the coroner to have partially dissected her; pulling the branch out of her brain brings her back to life. You can see that this series has a dark edge to it.

Other "heroes" include Hiro, a Japanese otaku salaryman, into Star Trek and The X-Men (no hiding of borrowed influences here) with a high-pitched voice and goofy character; Hiro can bend space and time, stopping the clock or moving to other continents or time periods by squinting real hard. Nathan Petrell is running for Congress when he finds out he can fly; his brother Peter thought he could, but in actuality, he just borrows the powers of mutants he gets near to. One of them is Isaac Mendez, an artist who can paint the future, but only when high on heroin. And Niki Sanders is an Internet sex-cam model in Las Vegas who owes the mob big-time, with a little boy whose father is in jail. Her "power" is, apparently, to have a split personality, her alter-ego being able to rip men apart while Niki is blacking out. Apparently the series will introduce more "heroes" as time goes on; making a late appearance is Matt Parkman, a mind-reading cop.

The series is building up to a climax involving a mutant villain named Sylar who, among other things, impales victims with household objects, and maybe removes mutants' brains from their skulls. Or maybe that's some other villain, who may or may not be responsible for a nuclear bomb destroying New York, an event foreseen by two different characters. Stay tuned.

Less science-fictiony is Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. This show has the most promise, and may be the most short-lived. Aaron Sorkin is commanding this one like he did with Sports Night and The West Wing, and it is classic Sorkin. Not so much walk-and-talk stuff that Tommy Schlamme was known to bring in The West Wing, but the Sorkin story-and-dialog touch is unmistakable. If the series survives, it'll be great. However, it's not getting off to a blazing start, and could be an unfortunate early casualty of the season.

The show is about a Saturday Night Live-style weekend comedy skit show. In the first episode, Judd Hirsch guest stars as a Lorne Michaels type of executive producer who melts down on live TV (like Peter Finch's character in Network) after he sees the suits and the censors reduce his show to mindless pap. A new network president promises to remake the show and brings in Danny Tripp (Bradley Whitford) and Matt Albie (Matthew Perry), a close writer-producer team who left Studio 60 a few years ago, and now can't continue their successful new career of making movies for two years because Danny violated a drug probation; being free, they accept the challenge of re-making Studio 60. Sorkin's writing is top-class as usual, but one unfortunate side issue is that Sorkin can't write sketch comedy nearly as well as he can write good drama; the skits on the show don't come across as very funny.

Other characters include Timothy Busfield (also a producer) as the show's chief engineer (or whatever you call it); Sarah Paulson as the star of the show and Matthew Perry's love interest (they broke up years ago, thus creating the present sexual tension), Evan Handler as a chief writer who pissed off Matt Albie years back, and D.L. Hughley and Nathan Cordry among the show's leading talent.

Strangely similar in concept, 30 Rock is about a late night comedy skit show run by Tina Fey, whose job is overrun by a new network executive played by Alec Baldwin, who takes the woman-driven "Girlie Show" and makes a half-insane, controversial black male comedian the new star of the show. 30 Rock is off-the-wall, and, frankly, not very funny at all. I got through the premiere, but couldn't watch through the whole second episode. Alas, this bad show will probably out-survive Studio 60, unless there's any tastefulness left in TV.

One more new show is Ugly Betty, a series brought in by Salma Hayek, who cameos in every episode as a star in a telenovela, a job she used to have some time ago. Ugly Betty is based upon the hit Colombian telenovela, Yo Soy Betty, la Fea ("I Am Betty, the Ugly")--this is even playing on TV in Japan. The story is about Betty, an unattractive young woman with blue braces and a terrible fashion sense. A Latina from Queens, she aspires to work in the magazine industry. She is initially brushed off just because of her looks, until she is hired because of her looks--the publisher of a fashion magazine called "Mode" has installed his playboy son as the new chief editor and wants him to have an assistant he won't be tempted to have sex with. Betty stands out like a sore thumb among the ultra-chic snobs that populate most of the staff.

The melodrama has two arenas: Betty's home and her work. At home, there is her charming father, her attitude-prone sister, and her smart young nephew, who adores high fashion. There is also her boyfriend, who in the first episode runs off with the manipulative neighborhood slut, who also figures strongly in the show. The boyfriend must win his way back into Betty's heart after the slut dumps him after using his employee discount to buy a plasma TV.

Then there is the office: Betty's boss, Daniel, after initially trying to make Betty quit, comes to respect her, but they are pitted against conniving office staff. The chief villain is played by Vanessa Williams, who should have gotten the editor's job and regularly schemes to sabotage Daniel, with her effete, sycophantic assistant Marc, and the snooty, slutty receptionist, Amanda. Williams' character reports to Daniel's mother, former editor of "Mode," thought to be dead in a car crash perhaps engineered by Daniel's father, who is assisted by a shady henchman.

Usually I would not watch stuff like this, but I heard some good things about it and decided to give it a try. So far, I like it; it has just the right balance of goofy comedy and good storyline, and doesn't go too far off the dramatic edge into melodrama.

That's it for the present. Along with other continuing shows, it's more than enough to fill up one's free time...

Less Crowing than I Expected

So far, I haven't gotten the expected wave of conservatives I thought would swarm in to gloat about the recent bankruptcy filing by Air America Radio (AAR). That, of course, doesn't mean that conservatives in general haven't been gloating.

Of course, what they have been overlooking is the fact that conservative outlets like Fox News and the Washington Times lost far greater truckloads of money for many years, and only survived because of super-rich sugar daddies who were willing to subsidize the news operations at their personal expense. Thom Hartman does an excellent job of outlining how Rupert Murdoch lost hundreds of millions of dollars with Fox News before it started turning a profit.

Originally, Murdoch started "News Corp," a precursor to Fox News, which lost so much money that Murdoch had to put up his personal assets as collateral, and still almost lost everything when a Pittsburgh bank threatened to do the exact same thing to Murdoch that one of AAR's creditors just did--demanding payment that would force a Chapter 11 filing. That's where AAR is now, doing worse, but not that much worse. AAR is still on the air and has a good chance of staying on.

But Murdoch's money problems did not end there. After creating the Fox News Channel in 1996, the operation lost huge amounts of money for about five years. According to Brit Hume, the über-conservative mothership lost around $80 to $90 million per year before it finally started turning a profit. Compare this to AAR losing $10 to $20 million a year. AAR went bankrupt partly because of management issues, but more so because it doesn't have the kind of billionaire sugar daddy that conservative outfits enjoy. Conservatives would have you believe that it's liberal programming that's doing the damage, but by that measure, conservative programming was far more unpopular even in the conservative 90's, because Fox News performed even worse then.

AAR has only been out there for just a few years. If it is able to survive its current bout with creditors, it still has the same chance (just as it is having the same problems) that Fox or other conservative news outlets had when they started.

And in case you think that I am just making up excuses on the fly in the face of AAR's mortal demise, keep in mind that I and others were pointing out expected growing pains from the start. Back in the first month of AAR's operation, I blogged about Fox News' starting woes, and a few months later reminded readers that Rush Limbaugh took five years to get ratings worth talking about. AAR is starting from a tougher place than any of these conservative bastions did, and still has years to go before it takes them longer than Fox, Limbaugh, and others took to reach a point of profitability.

As I have noted before, I am a Mac user, so I am very much used to people crowing prematurely about the demise of a company I respect.

Not to mention that there are hopes for the future. The swing towards conservatism has ended, and the pendulum is very clearly moving back towards liberalism; the same political tide that buoyed Fox and Limbaugh and others in the 90's is turning, and could very well sweep up the liberal voices on the air.

And AAR is not the only operation out there. The same folks who started up AAR have just started up a new network, Nova M Radio, which streams live over the Internet (listen on iTunes).

In short, the jury is still out and liberal radio's demise has been greatly exaggerated.

Why I Don't Like Reading the Japanese News

There are too many stories like this one [short-lived link]:

Woman, who made 9-year-old stepdaughter eat rubbish off floor, arrested

There are just too many stories about horrendously depressing personal tragedies in the Japanese press, more often than not having to do with child abuse and family members killing each other. A few examples from the last few week's news include:

• Woman commits suicide after losing boyfriend in derailment
• Aichi man sentenced to life in prison for killing 6 relatives
• Osaka man arrested for beating woman, letting her freeze to death
• Mother given 12-year prison term for starving 19-year-old son to death
• Body of woman wanted for questioning in deaths of Nagano family found in river
• Three found dead with nails stuck in their heads in Nagano home
• Couple admits to strangling woman in Gunma apartment
• Aichi woman slashed by knife-wielding stranger
• Driver who killed 4 children in Saitama caused accident in May due to same reason

-- Stories gleaned from Japan Today

Now, I'm not one of those people who want the press only to publish feel-good, positive news stories; I simply have little desire to read about the gruesome details about how badly individuals abuse each other, and the Japanese press simply seems to me to have far more than the usual share of stories about how people abuse, maim, and kill each other, with the grisly details spelled out in the headlines so you can't avoid cringing at them.

I'm not sure about this, but I really started seeing this trend grow in the 1990's. In the 80's, there would be some stories of this nature, but not so many. However, after the bursting bubble and economic decline between those decades, I started seeing a lot more in this vein, especially after a few landmark stories, like the serial killer of little girls who had massive amounts of porn in his apartment, and the student who decapitated another student and put the head in a storage locker at a train station. This was about the same time that Japan fell from it's superior Japan-is-safe mentality, when people were afraid to travel to places like Hawaii for fear of the horrible crime wave that awaited them; that reversed in the 90's as people saw Japan as falling apart, full of crime--despite the actual crime stats not wavering all that much.

There is some personal preference involved in my reaction as well; I am averse to news which peers too closely into the private lives of others. I deliberately avoid reading the stories about celebrities' private lives; I could not tell you much if anything at all about Michael Jackson's escapades, Britney Spear's baby troubles, Brangelina's bouts with paparazzi, or Madonna's current adoption story, outside of what I glance in the headlines as I pass the stories by. I could care less. But the same goes for the private lives of anyone, doubly so for depressing stories. Maybe I'm just not a people person, but I just don't want to hear about it. I'd sooner read stories about local zoning ordinance changes discussed in the city council chambers.

(OK, I'll fess up to approving of the spilling of details about Republican politicians' private lives, but only because [a] they sell themselves as the high-family-values-and-morals crowd, an [b] they do the same in spades to Democrats--it's more of a sauce-for-the-goose kind of thing.)

Part of this is also my standing on what the press should be reporting. Zoning ordinances aren't sexy, but they are relevant and important. People's private melodramas are sexy, but have zero relevance to anyone not immediately related to the participants, unless it somehow or other touches on law or social issues.

And I seriously believe that news organizations should be restricted when it comes top reporting on private matters. Yes, I know, the First Amendment in inviolate--but not when it conflicts with other rights just as important. You can't publish libel, you can't incite murder, etc.

And it seems to me that freedom of the press was intended to report to people about what was happening publicly, so as to lead to an informed population; it was not intended to make the entire population into an inviolate peeping tom. Gossip columns, "news" stories about personal affairs and dalliances, and stories about others' personal details might be entertaining to most, but that does not make them protected. The right to a free press is being taken and abused in a way that I do not see as necessary for maintaining a free press; I do not believe that gossip is a necessary evil.

Just as much as I believe in the right to a free press, I believe in the right to privacy; and where there is a conflict, the freedom of the press should only win out in cases where public relevancy can be demonstrated. I think that this is a clear enough distinction that there would be no risk to losing the true protections of the First Amendment were this to be enforced.

Okay, I've strayed a bit. But there is a common thread here--we really should stop nosing into the private affairs of strangers. For me, that's easy: I have no desire to in the first place. But for those who love it, it is still none of their business, and only serves to harm.

This all brings to mind a line I very much enjoyed from an episode of the new TV show Ugly Betty (a surprisingly good new series), where a fashion gossip show host smugly told her audience: "Remember, we only make other people feel bad to make you feel good."

Down But Not Out

Air America Radio filed for bankruptcy today when negotiations with a creditor broke down. It has apparently been losing money for some time. This is normal for a startup, but AAR apparently has not been able to get up off the ground financially, despite good demographics and a listener base of 4 million. Since it does not have a zillionaire backer like Rupert Murdoch, there was no one who was able to pour a billion dollars into the network to start it up and then run it at a loss for many years until things shaped up. Instead, it is a small startup, having the same problems as other small startups. Is it a matter of delivering the goods for advertisers, or simply selling the concept of liberal talk radio to advertisers who simply buy into the right-wing pitch that it just won't work? Are the demographics as good as they have been painted generally, or was that a selective reading? (So far, there has been no unbiased analysis either way.) Or is it simply the stigma of an unproven startup without much backing? If only the right-wing conspiracy theorists were right and George Soros would pour the money into AAR that Murdoch did into Fox, then the story would be different. Instead, there are struggles--but, at least for the time being, AAR is still on the air. It might continue to struggle and then die out, or it might shape up and do better, perhaps after the social pendulum continues to swing back towards liberalism.

Until then, one can be sure that there will be a tremendous amount of crowing and celebrating among conservatives over this development; I predict that the same people who cower and stay away from commenting when news is bad for Republicans, will come out in force, doing Google searches for blog posts on AAR so they can come in and gloat, ignoring how long it took people like Limbaugh or networks like Fox to pick up steam...

Murdoch, Ailes, and Winning

A recent quote from Faux News chief Roger Ailes:

Murdoch didn't invest a billion dollars in this company so people can have jobs. ... He did it to WIN. ... He wants to win and so do I.

One question is, how does Ailes define the word "win"? Win in the ratings game? Or win politically? The conventional wisdom would point to the former, but you have to wonder... if suddenly the market turned liberal and you had to be liberal to get ratings, how badly would Ailes and Murdoch want to "win" the market then?

Summer Movies (Autumn Movies, in Japan)

As the recent summer movies have filtered late into Japan, I went to see them, ending recently with the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. PotC: Dead Man's Chest was not nearly as good as I expected it to be, and may have been the most disappointing film of the batch. It had great special effects, some fun and clever fighting scenes... but it just wasn't very entertaining. Johnny Depp is what made the movie come alive last time, and he just didn't seem to be in this one too much, at least not like he was last time. His lines this time around were not really all that clever. If you watched the teaser and the trailer, then you'll have seen perhaps the funniest stuff he does... and the other stuff is not any more interesting. Not that Depp failed, it's just that he didn't have as much of a chance this time. If you like monsters and makeup and action sequences, this film is a bit dark but good for you. If you came to have fun and watch Depp do his thing, you'll likely be disappointed. Not to mention that the film ends on a cliffhanger, with nothing resolved.

SPOILER WARNING: I spill the beans about some of what happens in the X-Men movie--if you want to see it and haven't yet, move on down to the following paragraph. (Sorry, Helen!)

The latest X-Men movie has also been called "disappointing," but I don't really think so. You have to expect a lot before you can be disappointed. It was pretty much exactly what I expected from this franchise: weird mutant superpowers, action and special effects, twists and turns and so forth. Maybe it didn't offer much more than Pirates, but I liked the presentation better. The strange thing was that in the previous X-Men movie, only one of the main characters, Jean Grey, was killed off; in the third movie, she comes back to life... but then half the cast gets killed off, with many others (including McKellen's Magneto) being de-powered. So, will they all come back for X-Men 4? Or was this the filmmakers' way of closing down the series? Probably not, as two of the main characters "come back" at the end. Magneto is seen regaining his powers after having gotten a quadruple-dose of the "mutant cure." And Professor X--an early surprise death in the film--sneaks back in as well. Most people forgot about the beginning of the film, where X is lecturing students about the ethicality of transferring one's mind into a brain-dead body and shows a video of a doctor with such a patient. At the very end of the film, after the credits, there's a small snippet you may have missed if you left early, with Xavier waking up in that body. So... "X-Men 4: The Really Final Last Stand"? [Actually, IMDB says that a film called Magneto will be released next year--but it looks like a prequel. Although the story revolves around younger characters, McKellen and Stewart are listed as the actors. However, the current X-Men movie shows the two men as being younger, using CGI effects to make them look more similar to photos of the two actors taken twenty years earlier.]

Much better than either of the two I just mentioned was Superman Returns. The story was more interesting, the character conflicts better, the acting, writing, and directing was a lot less comic-book style than the Superman films with Christopher Reeve... and the twists were much better, one in particular. Overall a pretty high quality film among the recent horde of comic book movies. It's hard to say if Brandon Routh was much better than Reeve as Superman, but there's no question that Kate Bosworth was a far better Lois Lane than Margot Kidder. Though, I must admit, I just really don't like Kidder at all, so maybe that's affecting my judgment. Kevin Spacey I like in just about everything, so he also wins my vote over Gene Hackman as a better Lex Luthor. Generally speaking, the film has a better script, cast, and director than the previous films. If they continue the franchise, I hope they don't descend into silliness like most of these series do.

The surprising low performer of the bunch was Mission: Impossible 3, not because it was bad, but because it didn't perform well at the box office. Again, expectations are pretty low considering the franchise--we know we're gonna get high-grade, high-tech spy action with lots of loud explosions, and that's pretty much what happened. J. J. Abrams actually managed to make the film pretty interesting on top of all that, with a surprisingly well-done romance, good, strong characters, and Cruise did his usual fairly good job of acting. The ending was perhaps the weakest part, as it was eminently predictable beyond a certain point, but that was bearable. The action was pretty much non-stop, and for what it was, it was a very good movie. So why did it flop? Many say it's because people are weirded out over Tom Cruise now. To me, that doesn't make much sense--I long ago gained the ability to separate the real-life talent from the performances in their media (otherwise I wouldn't be able to enjoy any of the Schwarzenegger flicks), but I guess a lot of people can't do that. Too bad, this was a pretty good film.

The first film I saw this summer, however, was The Da Vinci Code. It should be a no-brainer that any film directed by Ron Howard with Tom Hanks in it is going to be pretty good, and this one was. Of course, the "facts" in the storyline itself have been fairly thoroughly debunked, with stories and details within the plot often exaggerated or even fabricated, but that's normal in stories like this, like with Michael Crichton novels. If one can suspend disbelief and treat this as a kind of alternate-universe story, it's a ton of fun. Ian McKellan, as always, is a treat to watch, and the film is richly photographed and paced very well.

Several films are coming out soon that I'm not interested in enough to see at the theater, such as The Lake House, World Trade Center, The Lady in the Water, 16 Blocks, Snakes on a Plane ("Snake Flight" in Japanese), and Nacho Libre. The earliest film I'd likely want to see is Casino Royale, which will be out in December, and so I'll see it in the U.S. (for a lot cheaper than the $15 admission price in Japan!). An Inconvenient Truth gets released in Japan only after the new year--a month and a half after the DVD goes on sale in Japan. Since the American DVD only costs $2 more than a single movie theater ticket in Japan, which one is preferable is hardly a contest--which is why they have region coding in the first place, one would suppose.

Language Is Slow

Sometimes, that it. Some vocabulary charges in on a horse, like "blog" and "blogging" did. But some language persists. After all, you still "dial" a number, even though rotary dials have been gone for a few decades now ("enter a number" would be more accurate). We still get "on" airplanes instead of "in," a century-old borrowing of seagoing terminology.

And despite the popular use of the word "photoshop" as a verb to describe the digital alteration of a photograph (after the name of the overwhelmingly popular image editing software), a lot of people are still using the old term "airbrush," after the classic air-powered spray-painting tool used in days of yore to alter photographs printed on paper. I found this to be the case in the Katie Couric scandal, where CBS photoshopped a Couric publicity still to make her look slimmer. Even a magazine dedicated to photography used "airbrushed," even though it is certain that Photoshop, and not airbrushing, was used. Old habits die hard.

And as an interesting side note, the sites I referenced (all the sites I could find, in fact) only offered a side-by-side comparison. The side-by-side comparison mostly emphasizes the general slimming features, especially in the gaps between her arms and torso. Again, this sort of comparison is a holdback from print photography days, while on the web, a superimposed animated GIF image--which I have prepared at top right--much more vividly shows the alterations done (if it doesn't animate, turn animations on in your browser). You can see, for example, that part of the trick was to simply thin out the whole photo (or perhaps pinch the photo significantly)--see the background changing. Pay close attention to her neck and bust line as well to see where they put more work into it. Note the shadow added beneath her chin. This comparison shows that it was not just a 2-minute job--they really put some effort into this.

I made the animation cycle at two seconds because anything faster would be too distracting for reading purposes. However, if you click on the image, you'll see a version which cycles at a half second, making it much easier to see the changes done.

Speaking of Monkeys...

It's Monkey Tuesday! Okay, it's not. It's Saturday. But with the Penn Jillette Show, in a way, it's always Monkey Tuesday. That's a little tradition that they came up with. Every Tuesday, people call or write in with Monkey stories. They've already mined out the flinging and simian self-pleasuring stories, apparently, and now want mostly stories that end in violence. But they get all kinds, and they're usually funny.

If you listened to the podcast before and noticed that it stopped a month or two ago, just go to this podcast, where you'll find fans have kept the podcast alive, and still without commercials. I find myself disagreeing with a lot of what Jillette says, but his presentation makes it very easy to listen to and enjoy--and that's a very strong quality.

The RIAA--What Sweethearts

Despite lesser publicity than at first, the RIAA continues to seek useless, vindictive lawsuits against people they believe have cheated them out of record profits. They really have to sue such people, don't they? After all, cheating others out of record profits is their territory, and they can't very well have other people horning in on their racket, can they?

One case in Particular, Warner et al v. Scantlebury, shows the record labels at their finest. In this case, the defendant died. Did that end the case? Of course not! If the deceased ripped off a few songs over BitTorrent, the RIAA cannot allow a simple thing like the offender's death to get in the way! So the lawyers are going to sue the deceased's estate. After all, the deceased person's family probably cloned his iPod minutes after his death and are listening to all that stolen music right now!

But here's the compassionate part: they are holding off the attack dogs for 60 days to allow the family to grieve. Then they sue the ass off the memory of their loved one.

30 Days

In case you're unable to watch it directly, 30 Days is now available on iTunes. Essentially it's the standard $1.99 per episode, with no price break for buying a season's worth. But for the moment, the first episode of season 2, "Immigration" (an excellent episode), as well as a short making-of documentary, are downloadable free-of-charge. You do have to have an iTunes account, however.

WWDC Beginning Soon; M:I:III

WWDC starts in 90 minutes--just a heads up to those getting this blog via RSS, who are interested in Macs, and who weren't aware of the timing for the event. If that number of people > zero.

Here's perhaps the best live-update site for the keynote speech.

Off-topic: I just got back from seeing M:I:III, the late show. (Late show tickets are only $11! Whee!) Yeah, I know, M:I:III, old news, but (a) it opened two months late in Japan, and (b) I waited an extra month so I could be into my vacation and not have to fight the crowds.

I don't know why that movie didn't do well at the box office (though I just checked, worldwide it hit $380 million, not incredibly shabby). Yes, it had a weak, predictable ending, but everything except the last five minutes of action was as good as the M:I movies get, and Abrams managed to put in a few fun bits at the end despite the weakness. And before that, almost nothing except blam, blam, blam--loud noises, big explosions, lots of jumping and sneaking around and fighting and other fun stuff. What more could one ask for?

The Exodus Code

Is James Cameron another closet Christian? He's coming out with a documentary called "The Exodus Decoded" (gee whiz, any exploitation of The Da Vinci Code ya think?) which purports to explain the miracles in Exodus 'scientifically' using "archeological" evidence, up to and including the parting of the Red Sea.

The name Immanuel Velikovsky comes to mind... in addition to this film, which I saw when I was a kid.

I suppose one question will be, will this be presented as a way to explain the exact events of the exodus as written in scripture, or will it treat it as a general historical event from which the legends and stories arose? The difference being, of course, that the former would be simply an attempt to shape conjecture and pretend it is 'science' to legitimize a religious belief, while the latter would not be trying so hard to "prove" the Bible to be literal. Orson Scott Card's fictional telling of the Noah legend in Pastwatch would be a good example of the latter. But Cameron's work seems to be more of the former type:

The documentary’s website argues that a series of earthquakes may have “destabilised the entire Nile Delta system and resulted in part of the delta sliding off the African continental shelf”. This would have raised the level of land around the Sea of Reeds, believed to have been saltwater swamps around El Balah, the now extinct lake.

“In other words, the sea parted,” the website says. “Water would have cascaded from higher ground to lower ground . . . creating dry land on which the Israelites could cross. This event would also have caused an enormous ‘backsplash’ of water, a veritable tsunami. If the waves went a mere seven miles inland they would have engulfed the Egyptian army.”

One has to be instantly skeptical of these claims that have extraordinarily rare, extreme catastrophic geological events timed perfectly to recreate biblical passages; the people making the claims tend to be rather credulous when it comes to accepting whatever information comes down the stream and interpreting it generously to fit their preconceptions.

Strangely, Cameron is not mentioned on the official web site...

Publicity Clowns

I was watching a little segment on YouTube about two guys who pulled a strange and unfunny stunt on a live Fox News program. It was about two brothers who made Internet videos about how easy it is to steal a bike even when chained; as one of them demonstrates by using a portable saw to cut through a heavy chain, the other fakes getting injured, falling to the ground screaming, which supremely pissed off the Fox reporter.

Why mention this? Because I recognized them. They are Casey and Van Neistat, the same clowns who made a big splash two and a half years ago by wildly exaggerating iPod battery deficiencies. In short, they used their iPod almost constantly over one and a half years, and then were outraged when the rechargeable battery lost its ability to maintain a long charge (something that would be obvious to and fully expected by anyone who has used rechargeable batteries before). They claimed that it was impossible to replace the battery, and so started defacing iPod ads all over New York; they became famous when their video of this defacement became popular on the Internet.

When it was demonstrated that the iPod battery could be replaced, they countered by buying the most expensive one and badly botching the replacement job, then claiming that an overpriced $100 replacement was impossible to do anyway--when in fact, replacement kits could be bought for $50 and were easy to perform flawlessly.

None of that seemed to matter as the Neistats launched to fame--for at least a while. Now they're in the news again after having made videos of themselves stealing bikes from all over New York, and the Fox segment made a bigger splash--not because their badly-performed decapitation prank was funny at all, but because of how the reporter, Jodi Applegate, reacted to the prank.

Frankly, as much as I detest Fox News, I couldn't find much fault in Applegate's reaction aside from her rather sophomoric use of language for a network news reporter--"That was totally uncool!" "That was not cool, dude!" "They're jerks, and we were totally not part of planning that!" I probably would have reacted much the same way, though with slightly more dignified vocabulary. That said, it is still somewhat her own fault for having these two guys on the air without first checking them out; she could have easily figured out that they were nothing but juvenile publicity hounds.

Why They Won't Ask the Hard Questions

Here's a YouTube post of a segment from The Colbert Report, where Colbert takes the morning news shows to task. Two such shows had bits on Colbert making politicians look bad, and they both asked the question, why would politicians be so stupid as to go on to a show that would ask them questions that could make them look bad?

GOOD MORNING AMERICA'S JAKE TAPPER: But with the reputation-damaging risk associated with an appearance on The Colbert Report, why do politicians keep going on the show?

TODAY SHOW'S MATT LAUER: And yet they keep on coming!
CO-HOST: Why? Why?
LAUER: They think they're being hip, I don't know.

Underlying that question is a dark truth about journalism today: no one on television, radio, or in the print media is willing to ask hard questions to politicians for fear of the politicians avoiding them. They are unwilling to ask questions that might stump the politicians or make them look bad, and when the politician is obviously lying or is avoiding answering a question, they let them get away with it. It also shows up the unwillingness of most politicians to face the public in a setting where their hypocrisy or ignorance could be revealed.

Watching Colbert's segment with the "news" people saying what they said makes this fact evident; they are clearly stumped as to why any politician would appear when the interviewer is not some emasculated softball-thrower. Although Colbert did not mention this aspect of it specifically, the subtext is frighteningly--and comically--clear. And you gotta admit, it's huge fun to see Colbert get Robert Wexler to say, "I enjoy cocaine because it's a fun thing to do!" and to see Colbert absolutely destroy Lynn Westmoreland by pointing out that he was pushing legislation requiring the Ten Commandments be posted in the House and Senate--and then asking him to name the Ten Commandments. Westmoreland could only get out three.

Maybe part of the reason the politicians agree to go on the show is that they think they'll be treated with kid gloves, like with most interviewers. Now, Wexler seems to be pretty hip here--he knew what was going on and easily could have refused or sidestepped Colbert's request--other politicians have done so. But Westmoreland appears to have had no clue as to what he was getting himself into. And that's probably why most people, not just politicians, agree to appear in segments on The Colbert Report and The Daily Show: because they simply don't know what they're in for. The shows are popular, but not so popular (especially with certain segments of the population) that a lot of people who agree to appear don't know what they're agreeing to. That these people tend to be un-hip and often clueless just makes it funnier.

Damn Those %#@$ Lip Readers!

From IMDB Studio Briefing:

The executive editor of Frontline, produced by Boston's WGBH for the Public Broadcasting System, has taken exception to a new directive from PBS on how programs are to deal with language that could result in an FCC fine. Writing in Current magazine, Louis Wiley Jr. noted a paragraph in the directive saying that "if the F-word or the S-word were uttered to camera so that viewers could recognize it from the speaker's mouth, the lips must be pixelated." Wiley speculated that at first he imagined such pixelated scenes turning up on the late-night talk shows. "My next thought? If public television producers are forced to not only bleep words but also to pixelate lips, most will simply cut the scenes, no matter how powerful or relevant, rather than see them turned into a joke."

Seems strange to me; with the technology available with today's television broadcasters, wouldn't it simply be easier to do a little Photoshopping? I would think that the main objection by broadcasters would be the ridiculous appearance of lip pixelation, not the offense to deaf people and lip readers. The area of the speaker's mouth, saying a non-offensive word, could be lifted from some other part of the interview and superimposed on the swear word. Unless the available footage had no extra material using the same camera angles and lighting, it wouldn't be too hard, and the end product would be good enough to fool anyone but the experts--and the lip readers, who would see the strange juxtaposition of the non-offensive word ("I don't know what the horse I was thinking!")

Of course, this all is within the context of living in a country with such stupid censorship laws, and such ridiculous fines that can now be imposed. But let's not get into that.

An Elevated, Intelligent Editorial Policy

Via Pharyngula, here is a recently stated editorial policy from a long-established publication:

As politics go, we're surprised so many readers expect us or any publication to provide "balance," which reflects a belief in the fallacy that there are two equally valid sides to every story. You see this in the debate over global warming and evolution. Thousands of scientists stand on one side of the issue, recognizing that global warming is a problem and that evolution is firmly established, while only a few detractors stand on the other.

Now, that's integrity, intelligence, and editorial virtue for you: acknowledge the facts, not the politics. So, where did this paragon of reasoned discernment come from? Who is responsible for having the courage to present a reality-based policy for presenting the fact? Was it the New York Times? The Washington Post? The Wall Street Journal? Nope. It was Playboy.

There is no link provided, so I can't verify this--but in today's world of journalism, somehow this would not at all surprise me.

Futurama Will Be Back!

It is now official, Comedy Central has commissioned Fox Entertainment to produce 13 new episodes of Futurama! The series is scheduled to come back sometime in 2008. Naturally, I'd love to see it back earlier and with more episodes per season (what is up with that baloney, anyway? 13 episodes? Hey, Cable TV, grow a pair, willya?), but any new Futurama is going to be good Futurama. All the original cast and crew have signed on to return.

Not to say they didn't see it coming: when the last episode of Futurama aired, the opening subtitle gag read: "See You on Some Other Channel."

And so it will be.

By the way: if you want a little fix now, see this Futurama-animated commercial for "An Inconvenient Truth," voiced by Billy West, John DiMaggio, and Al Gore ("Yes, I play a streetwise pimp with a hybrid pimpmobile").

John Varley

Yes, I know I've been reading the Farmer book To Your Scattered Bodies Go for months and months now, just like I was reading Conason's Big Lies for more than a year before that. I should really get rid of the "What I'm Reading Now" panel, since I rarely update it. Truth be told, I've been reading parts of Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe and V.S. Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain up until last week, as kind of a nostrum to get me to sleep faster. Not that the books are boring--far from it--but they aren't page-turners that'll keep me up all night. So when I start reading something good but not great after midnight, I'll get to sleep pretty soon. And the books last a long time that way.

But like the Grisham novels that kept me awake earlier this year, I have started on a few new novels ordered from Amazon Japan. One of them is Varley's recent novel, Mammoth.

For quite some time, Varley has been one of my favorite authors. My brother-in-law got me started on Varley's Titan trilogy years ago, and since then I've tried to read everything he's written. One of his more recent series was based on his dominant "Eight Worlds" future history, including Steel Beach and The Golden Globe, both masterful cacophonies of absurdly delightful entertainment. There's supposed to be a third book in that series called Irontown Blues, but Varley seems to have set that aside for the moment.

And that's where we come to his most recent books. Varley's past novels have always had a certain weight to them, a seriousness and gravity despite the madness. With his last three novels, however, he has bucked that trend. It has long been clear that Varley is a big Heinlein fan, something made abundantly clear in Steel Beach. But somewhere around the year 2000, Varley's writing turned away from his Eight Worlds depth and transformed into a Heinleinesque juvenile science fiction vein.

His first book in this trend, Red Thunder, was essentially a retelling of Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo. Varley's book had a group of youngsters getting mixed up with an ex-astronaut and his crazy-genius relative and making a backyard spaceship that would take them to Mars--to beat out the Chinese mission vying to be the first humans to set foot on the red planet.

Red Thunder kind of startled me when I read it, as it seemed like it wasn't Varley at all. It was almost like Heinlein and Varley had collaborated to make the piece. In a way, I guess you could call it "Varley Lite"--less filling, but still tastes great.

I didn't entirely expect Mammoth to follow in that vein, but it did--at least as far as I've read through it so far (200 of the 340 pages). It's light reading, but quite a lot of fun. Not as thick and rich as Varley usually does; his prior novels held much more punch and value in every page. It's almost like Varley consciously toned down his writing to fit a more Grisham- or Chricton-like popcorn pace, either to sell more copies, or possibly even in search of the one that will be bought out by Hollywood and made into next summer's blockbuster.

It's still fun, though. Mammoth begins with the title character, a hybrid Columbian and Wooly Mammoth being found encased in ice in Manitoba, like the Discovery Channel special on the Siberian mammoth unearthed a few years back. Except next to this mammoth, they find the frozen corpse of a human being, wearing a wristwatch and bearing a metal briefcase. Time travel pandemonium ensues. And don't worry, I didn't give away anything that's not in the blurb on the back cover.

Varley's latest book, Red Lightning, is a sequel to Red Thunder, but is still in hardcover, so I'm waiting on that one.

I wouldn't mind, of course, if Varley came back and at least finished of Irontown Blues before continuing on his old-age juvenile kick.

World Cup: The Movie

If you're a really, really big fan of soccer--excuse me, football--then you might want to cough up ¥2500 and stay up real late to watch it live in a movie theater. Toho Cinemas is having three late-show soccer broadcasts, somehow shown on screen via satellite TV, featuring games the Japanese team is participating in.

The first is on June 12 (Japan vs. Australia) and the second on the 18th (Japan vs. Croatia), both starting at 10:00 pm Japan time. The third (Japan vs. Brazil) starts at 4:00 am, on the 22nd/23rd (the time is listed as "28:00").

By chance, my father and I were talking about a very similar thing just last week; he remembered going to see the World Cup years ago when it was shown to an audience at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. He managed to get out of the building before any rioting began when the transmission cut off in the middle of the game. I imagine that similar problems could arise here in Japan: the games will be broadcast during Typhoon season, when satellite TV reception can easily be washed out.

In the meantime, as far as actual movies are concerned, there are very few summer blockbusters opening on time in Japan, as is custom; for some reason, Japan is almost always the very last country to see films open. The DaVinci Code opened the same as elsewhere (and is still selling big), but M:I:3 is not opening here until July, Over the Hedge is not coming until early August, the late-June Superman Returns shows up in Japan in mid-August, and X-Men 3 is delayed until mid-September. The second Pirates of the Caribbean film is delayed, though only by three weeks. The delays are not caused by translation schedules, it has to do with the vacation season coming in August--though that does not explain July and September releases.

There are some beneficial effects of this phenomenon, however: Miami Vice: The Movie is not on the schedule at all. Thanks be to Merciful Allah.

The Original Star Wars, Re-re-re-revisited

Though I am not surprised at all at this. Lucas is a shrewd businessman, in that he understands how to sell the exact same thing many times over to the same people. Take the Star Wars motion picture soundtracks, for instance. There were the original soundtracks for each of the first three movies. Then there was a reissuing of the soundtracks together. Then they reissued the soundtracks in a new artsy box with a few new tracks added to each score. Then the films were re-released with new effects, and each soundtrack was re-released individually. Then they were reissued yet again as a group, with more new material.

So now, after releasing the first three movies in a variety of forms, then re-releasing them on DVD, I'm not terribly shocked that Lucas has re-released them again, this time in their original form with each film in a 2-disc set. Then they'll undoubtedly come out as a three-film combo set. Then as individual films with both original and special edition formats combined. Then those together as a set, with more new material. He'll probably find another ten ways to re-release the films and soundtracks until every permutation has been covered, then maybe they'll find even more ways. I'm optimistic like that. Heck, I don't think that either the soundtracks or the films have been released with all six films' material together. And we haven't even seen anything in High-Definition format yet.

Probably Lucas will eventually sell a 200 GB Blu-Ray compilation of all six films with all possible combinations of originals and remixes in HDTV quality with all material from all soundtracks and all documentaries with all interviews and every other scrap of Star Wars footage all included... but not until it's been sold a few dozen ways in a few dozen combinations before then. Gotta shake down those Star Wars fans for every cent they've got every few years.

...And Sometimes They Miss

This week's South Park was a fairly big disappointment, save for a few small segments where Cartman eats and craps fake treasure. There has been some talk about the show's right-wing tilt, but the past few weeks have shown it up pretty starkly. In the recent two-parter about showing Muhammad, the show skewered everyone, from terrorists to people afraid of terrorism, network executives, The Simpsons, Family Guy, reporters, car chases--hell, they criticized Comedy Central for not allowing them to show a cartoon of Muhammad, and even ripped on themselves for being too preachy at times. But in the hour-long episode which made fun of just about anything and everything, only one character with more than a few lines was kept reasonable: George Bush. What the hell? Probably the easiest person to make fun of, and they make him the only sane, stable, and unfunny character in the show. (Were they trying to be ironic?) Well, actually, they also didn't make fun of manatees, but then, who could?

Now contrast to the show two weeks later, where Al Gore is shown as some lame, bizarre, psycho loser warning everyone of "Man-Bear-Pig," and acting like some deranged kid who thinks he's a superhero but is really screwing up. I kept waiting for the whole thing to have a point, a punch line, or a funny line, but it never did. If Man-Bear-Pig showed up when everyone thought it was imaginary and it was a take on global warming, I could see that. Or something, even if it totally trashed Gore, to make there be a reason for it, even if that reason was just to be funny. I can laugh at liberals as much as the next guy, but this was not witty or comical, even in a stupid way; it was just... weird. Like they put that in there not because they had something to laugh at, but instead just because they hated Gore's guts. It was less like a regular South Park episode, and more like they got drunk and started to rant, thinking they were being funny when everybody just stares uncomfortably.

The show (and Parker and Stone's movies) take on liberal celebrities often, as well as liberal causes, sometimes with a vicious slant. And usually, it's done in a funny way. And while they do take on some conservative elements (big businesses, rednecks, right-to-lifers), they have rarely, if ever, skewered a right-wing politician or celebrity. The closest I can think of is Mel Gibson, who's not so much political as religious (he's never identified himself politically, and though he does have some conservative views, he also opposed the Iraq War and even praised Michael Moore for Fahrenheit 9/11).

Apparently Trey Parker is a Libertarian, and Stone is the one who steers the show against the left; he has said, "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals." It shows. Strangely, Parker categorizes both of them as centrists, "pretty middle-ground guys," and Stone claims they take on "both sides."

Don't take me wrong--I love the show, no less when they rip on liberals, and you can't take it seriously politically, or any other way, for that matter. The show where the people with butts where their faces should be turned out to be Ben Affleck's parents, that was hilarious. But what I presume to be Stone's utter contempt for liberalism does more than just tilt the show right, it sometimes comes out just bizarrely hateful without much to be funny about.

Star Trek Gets Lost

I never really cared much for the idea of the "Star Trek: Academy" movie, one which would take place a decade or two before the original series picked up, with a young Kirk, Spock and McCoy meeting at Starfleet Academy and going out on their first assignment. I've heard the concept for a very long time now, as far back as 1992, in fact. It's a movie concept that has been dredged up time and time again, rumored about every time there's a new Star Trek project in the offing. It just didn't seem feasible to get actors who could really pick up those three roles and play them convincingly, not to mention the question of a movie about three young cadets having an adventure. I always figured it was nothing much more than a vehicle for some producer to get a movie made so they could cash in a paycheck.

There must be something to the idea, however. Why the sudden switch? J. J. Abrams has picked up the project and started running with it. You know, the guy who's responsible for Lost, who's directing the third Mission: Impossible film. Nothing like a name associated with success to breathe life into a project. Abrams will supposedly be co-writing the movie with writers from Alias, co-producing with Lost producers, and will reportedly be directing the film himself. Abrams has writing credits which include Armageddon in addition to M:I-3. Chances are that Abrams is simply a big Star Trek fan and wants to take on the franchise himself, at least for one movie. Hopefully Paramount will never give it back to Rick Berman, who drove it into the ground (Enterprise only started getting better after Berman took his hands off the series). The last Berman Trek Movie, Nemesis, was unspeakable dreck and flopped at the box office. There have also been rumors that Joe Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame might take over the TV franchise; either he or Abrams would undoubtedly do a far better job than Berman's stale talents could provide.

Either way, the new movie at least has potential with the new blood. Who knows, maybe they'll be able to make it work. By the way, I like TG Daily's name for the film: Star Trek XI: The Inevitable. The film is slated for a 2008 release.

Sam the Man

This is so Samuel L. Jackson:

New Line's Snakes on a Plane, due to open on Aug. 18, has already produced an avid cult, "the first cult following created entirely by a movie's title," according to Canada's Maclean's magazine. According to the magazine, an uproar among the cultists ensued when studio executives decided to change the title to Pacific Air Flight 121. Even star Samuel L. Jackson joined in the ruckus, saying, according to Maclean's: "We're totally changing that back. That's the only reason I took the job: I read the title." The magazine said that in the end, not only did the producers restore the original name but that they "recently returned to Vancouver to film new scenes with profanity and gore, bringing the final product closer to the kind of garish B movie its name suggests." [Bold emphasis mine]

I love that guy. He was totally outright about being way excited to act with Yoda, and about wanting a purple lightsaber. And most big-name actors would have a problem with being suddenly eaten by a mutant shark halfway through a film. Not this dude. (In fact, his characters have been killed in 13 different movies.) You just don't get better than Sam.

Are They Kidding?

Boy, these guys really don't have a clue. I'm talking about the content producers, the movie studios specifically this time, who have decided to sell movies online. You download the movies to watch them on your computer. Hmm. Sounds reasonable--the best way to fight pirated movies would be to sell them to people in the same medium so they'll have a choice to do it legally within that medium. Apple showed that it's possible with music, and then with TV shows. Cool! Let's do it!

One problem: these studios, it seems, are incredibly stupid. And/or, they believe their customers are ever more stupid.

The movies will be sold at prices and with restrictions that make no sense whatsoever. They will charge from $10 for "classic" movies from their libraries, up to between $20 to $30 for new releases. The movies are the same ones available on DVD, which sell for the same price or lower. The online versions will not have the special features, like commentaries, alternate endings, deleted scenes, etc. They will be full quality--that is, they'll be no worse quality than you see on your TV (file sizes will be about 1.4 GB). You can make copies to watch on up to two other computers. But--you can only see them if you are using Windows XP, with Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher, and Windows Media Player 10. They say that maybe you can use Windows Me, maybe WMP 9, but no guarantees. What's more, you can't burn it on a DVD and you can't get or make an iPod version. You can watch on your TV, but only if your computer can connect via S-Video or RCA, which most desktop computers can't.

So here's the question: why download a movie?

That's what makes no sense. Buy the DVD, and you can play it on any computer, with any media player that can play DVDs. You can play it on your TV with your computer or DVD player. You can download free software from the Internet to rip the movie and make it viewable as a computer file or watch it on your iPod or PSP. You can get all the special features. For less money!

The copy-protect and limitations on which OS, browser, and media players can be used are stupid as hell. We're talking about movies that have already been ripped and are available for full-quality download over the Internet. So what is the copy-protect protecting? Not a damned thing. People downloading it for free from the Internet can do anything they want with the movie, watch it on any player, in any format. But paying customers hit all these restrictions. Stupid!

The reason why the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) worked is because it was a good deal, and the Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions were nearly invisible to the user. You buy a song off of the iTMS, you can play it on your computer, burn it onto as many CDs as you want, play it on your iPod, your CD Player in your home, your car, your office, whatever. You have to try really hard to hit any of the DRM restrictions. (Okay, so you can only play it on iTunes or your iPod, unless you burn it on a CD. The iPod restriction may suck, but iTunes is universal and the CD option is always there.) What's more, it's cheaper than buying CDs. At the store, you pay maybe $15 for a CD, you can get the same thing on the iTMS for ten bucks, and if you want, you can usually buy one song at a time for a buck a pop, which is what most people have always wanted anyway.

That's a good model--cheaper, faster, customizable, and restrictions most people don't even notice.

Now, when Apple started selling TV shows--which is probably the breakthrough event that prompted these new movie sales--they did it as well as they could. Yes, the TV shows are of not-so-good quality; yes, they lack the special features on DVDs; yes, taken together, they cost more than DVDs do. But we're talking TV shows, which will not be released on DVD for another year. And while the cumulative price for a season of TV shows from Apple will cost more than the whole season on DVD, the per-episode price is a manageable chunk, something many people are willing to spend. And they can watch on their iPod or their computer. Not as good a deal as the music, but at least a deal which is tolerable to many (not to me, but to many). So it works, and that's the bottom line.

But this new movie paradigm simply sucks. If they sell any movies, it'll be a novelty thing and won't last. Not unless they change it. First off, get rid of the stupid restrictions on the OS, browser, and media player. Have it be a regular AVI file, or even better, a DVD-format file set (with a VIDEO_TS folder) as an option, so people can save to a DVD. But wait, the studios protest, that means people can buy it from us and then put it on the Internet! So what? It's already on the Internet, you idiots! You've got to enable the paying customer, not cut them off at the knees for no good reason! The thing is, like with the iTMS customers (who could easily download the same songs for free, but instead choose to buy them!), you've got to offer at least the same or better than what pirates offer, and for a reasonable price.

Okay, maybe the studios can't give a good price because they would alienate the DVD retailers, their current cash cow. But if you're going to charge more and give less, at least get rid of the playing and copying restrictions, because they do nothing to protect, and everything to inconvenience.

(Yes, I know--Apple's iTMS restricts the song files to the iTunes media player and iPod digital devices. I agree, it's a restriction that sucks. But at least it's being done for a logical reason--Apple wants you to buy their goods. Not a reason that helps you, but at least it's a reason that makes sense. It'd be great if Apple allowed the songs to be played on any media player and on any digital device. But--and this is what it comes down to--they don't, and yet they make the business model work, and most people are happy with it.)

My guess is that after this abortive attempt at selling downloadable movies flops, they're going to try to tone things down bit by bit until they make a safe (they imagine), soft landing where they sell enough to make money and keep their little restrictions. But Steve Jobs may take advantage, and after the initial attempt fails, Apple will start selling movies--likely beginning with Disney titles--in a smarter way. After which it will be a question of whether the other studios will see the light and sign on, or stubbornly try their own greedy formula. We'll have to wait an see.

The Penn Jillette Show

A lot of podcasts out there are pretty good. Interesting about some TV shows (like Battlestar Galactica) using podcasts to do audio commentary, just like on a DVD--you record the show, then play back the podcast as the episode airs with the TV's sound off, and you've got your very own instant DVD-style commentary. Cool.

Another thing you can find sometimes are radio shows, for free. Air America did that abortively (though a few shows are put on late), but some shows are podcast up to date, and even commercial-free. One that I enjoy listening to is the Penn Jillette radio show, broadcast (or narrowcast) every weekday from Las Vegas. The show is just talk, and it's not necessarily right or left wing. He gets political sometimes, but a lot more talks about the magic and juggling business, about his beliefs (he's an ardent atheist), or just about stuff that comes up in the news or via some other source, and riffs on it with his co-host Michael Goudeau. The show takes calls, or emails to PennRadio@gmail.com.

So if you're looking for a simple, one-hour talk show (43 minutes in the commercial free version) with some go-to-hell (if it were to exist) attitude, give it a try.

The Simpsons: The Movie

You knew it was inevitable. OK, so it'll be like a TV episode, but maybe four times longer. Nevertheless, it's a fun idea, albeit more than a year away. This report, from MSNBC, of the teaser trailer that is being shown at the start of Ice Age 2:

The animated 25-second clip opens on a giant superhero S. “Leaping his way onto the silver screen,” intones a narrator, “the greatest hero in American history!” Cut to Homer Simpson sitting on his couch in his tighty whities. “I forgot what I was supposed to say,” he says. The narrator continues, “ ’The Simpsons Movie,’ coming to the screen, July 27, 2007.” “Uh, uh,” says Homer, “we better get started.”

By the way, no foolin'--this does not seem to be an April Fool's Day gag, as far as I can tell. Unlike Google's new product.

Air America Radio: Two Years and Going Strong

Air America Radio opened for business exactly two years ago with no more than six stations. Conservatives seemed to take unusual joy in predicting its demise. Here are a few of the comments I got to posts about AAR in the first year and two months on the air:

"As of July 16, 2004, the Arbitron shows that AA's ratings are in the toilet where they belong. No doubt soon they will be silenced by commercial force majeure." --July 17, 2004

"So much for the whiney liberal network." --January 12, 2005

"RIP Air America." --April 22, 2005

"AAR only has 52 stations." --April 29, 2005

"AIR AMERICA RATINGS ARE SINKING." --May 21, 2005

I love that second to last one, considering that AAR started with 6 stations, and a year later, had "only" 52. Today, AAR has 85 stations nationwide and can be heard on XM Satellite Radio as well. Not bad after two years' work for a network that started from scratch and had lots of initial financial troubles--and far from the ratings failure that conservatives tried to paint.

The usual false argument from the wingnuts relies on flat ratings published by Arbitron--total viewers as opposed to demographics. Demographics are what really determine success. When Star Trek first came out, NBC tried to kill it repeatedly because its overall ratings were a flop. Demographics were still new then, and the network learned too late that among target audiences, Trek was a big hit. The same mistake was aired repeatedly by conservatives trying to wish AAR out of existence--they would point to overall ratings, and only occasionally refer to demographics when they found an isolated tidbit somewhere that fit their argument.

Unfortunately, the demographic rundowns are for paying subscribers only, and are complex at that, so I can't reel them off for you. Nevertheless, AAR's success is self-evident; you don't go from 6 to 85 stations in just two years if your ratings are truly in the toilet. More proof can also be found in the average ages of the audiences. Franken's audience is 45 years old on average, whereas Rush Limbaugh's is 67--far outside the "golden" demographic that advertisers cherish most.

So, after two years, Air America is still going strong. Happy Birthday.

Not What You Want to Watch

I was on the CBS News web site and this headline caught my eye--a rather unfortunate choice of wording for the video link. I'm pretty sure that they don't show actual torture...

Pretty Much Every Time

So I turned on CNN today, wondering if it might have any content worth watching. Maybe starting again with Wolf Blitzer was a mistake. I watched the first several minutes of "The Situation Room." This supposedly "liberal" network in the "liberal" media has a funny way of showing it. In the short time I watched, Blitzer referenced the Democrats twice--and both times he represented them as opportunists, while his reference to Congressional Republicans was respectful and positive.

Blitzer spoke of Congressional Republicans as standing up to Bush on the Dubai ports deal, and only laterally mentioned the election year. But when he spoke of Democrats, Blitzer acted like they were just posturing, and directly stated that they were "trying to take credit" for the failure of the ports deal, as if they deserved none.

Then Blitzer promoed a segment with Hillary Clinton teaming up with Trent Lott to deliver a message. While he said nothing of Lott, he characterized Clinton as doing this to position herself politically--again, making clear the inference that if it's a Democrat doing something, the motives are purely to gain political advantage.

Darn that liberal media. Will they ever stop?

UPDATE: Here's the transcript of that show. Here's what Blitzer said on Clinton and Lott:

Plus, Democrat Hillary Clinton, a liberal, and Republican Trent Lott, a conservative -- unlikely allies teaming up for a cause. We're going to tell you what they want and why Senator Clinton is positioning herself -- at least trying to position herself -- as a centrist, new Democrat again.

See? If you read down the transcript, you'll see that the "Clinton is positioning herself for a run for president" aspect to the story is only tangential--Blitzer only refers to it quickly before they go to the actual story, which is what Clinton and Lott wanted to talk about. But Blitzer kept selling the "Clinton is being political" angle as if it were the main focus of the story.

UPDATE #2: Via TPM, yet another example of the "left-leaning" CNN using language outrageously tilted to the right; see the graphic below:

I'm not including a link because this page, as is, will be gone in a matter of hours. But get a load of the headline: "Dems Indicted"? The word "indicted" refers to criminal charges being filed. To use it in the context of a Republican political smear being made is outrageous. This is a perfect example of what I've commented on many times before--headlines and other references on CNN and other news outlets commonly refer to actions made by Democrats as being politically motivated, while similar or even more outrageously political actions by Republicans are commonly reported in a far more favorable fashion. Had this been Howard Dean attacking Frist and Lott, the headline would have been something more like "Dems Make Attack on Republicans; Striving for Political Advantage." But since it's a Republican attacking Dems, the headline is preposterously favorable and cooperative to the GOP attack, making it sound like the Democrats are guilty of a crime--which is exactly what Mehlman was shooting for. Even though the subtitle to the headline above is somewhat less deceptive, it is still heavily slanted towards the GOP message.

Not to mention the rather strong attention being paid to what is, after all, just an early campaign publicity stunt. When was the last time any major media outlet put, as its banner headline, anything along the lines of: "McCain, Frist Indicted: Democrats charge that likely Republican candidates for president are unfit and incompetent." Can't recall? Hell, CNN didn't give Howard Dean this kind of favorable spin when Dean was taking about actual criminal indictments of Republicans. I rest my case.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: liberal media, my ass. The media bias is clearly to the right.

And Some More TV

In the past, I've blogged on many of the shows I've been watching; I wrote about The Simpsons, The West Wing, Boston Legal, the Stargate series, and 24; then about Galactica, then Commander in Chief and Boston Legal again, then on The 4400 and Lost, and finally on Invasion and Threshold. Two of those series, Commander in Chief and Threshold, have been cancelled; CinC not regrettably (it had devolved into a fluffy she-always-wins/family-melodrama), and Threshold more regrettably (though it was becoming a more dull adventure-of-the-week show, it had good characters and some promise). The West Wing is also going off the air, though maybe it's time to. When Sorkin left, things sagged; though the show regained some of its bounce, it was turning into something it had not started out to be, and by necessity would have had to get a mostly-new cast anyway. At least in its final season, it did what I wished it did three years ago but glossed over: gone into the mechanics of a presidential election, in detail. And in its final season, it has done that admirably.

At a time when a lot of the shows I had liked went off the air, I thought I wouldn't have as much to watch--but more and more good shows seem to be popping up all over the place. More recently, I've picked up House M.D., Surface, and My Name Is Earl.

House, M.D. is a new medical-detective show, in a way similar to CSI in that it searches for scientific evidence where people are trying to hide things. You get the same zoom-into-the-body-organ close-up gross-out effects, but instead of suspects, they have symptoms, and instead of solving a murder, they cure a disease or other illness. And of course, the characters are different, and in this series, there is no questioning that Hugh Laurie is the star. His character is critically flawed but highly entertaining to watch. Brilliant, cruel, bitingly sarcastic and caustic, but with a chewy chocolate center. The character, Dr. Gregory House, is a diagnostician who takes the cases that baffle other doctors. He is a tortured, miserable man who in a way covets his misery. Some years earlier, he suffered a clot in his leg that killed his muscle tissue, leaving him limping on a cane and in constant, severe pain. He treats the pain with Vicodin, which kills his pain but leaves him an addict (one of his trademarks is popping a pill almost constantly). His pain, misery, and anger resulted in the woman he (still) loves leaving him, adding to his grief. He will cut down anyone he sees as deserving (almost everyone) without mercy, slashing with insults and mocking irony, including his patients, whom he often calls "idiots" to their faces, when he's not avoiding them like the plague. His credo is "everyone lies," referring to the fact that patients always, through embarrassment, fear, or some other base reason, hide critical information which is key to solving the medical mystery.

House is assisted by three physicians, neurologist Foreman, immunologist Cameron, and intensevist (??) Chase, whom he regularly bullies and orders around, but allows them to have their best at him when they can. The show begins with some illness hitting someone in the teaser (there is always a red herring to keep you guessing, but that schtick gets old fast), and then House and his staff write the symptoms on the whiteboard, throw around possible causes, decide the initial testing, and the game is afoot. From there, they typically make several wrong diagnoses, but eventually, when some critical clue falls into place, they solve the dilemma. Usually the patient is cured, but sometimes at a price (Cuddy's gardener lost a hand), and sometimes they lose the patient (as with the woman who lost her family then got rabies from a bat). House himself will inevitably violate one or two ethics rules, royally piss off half the people around him, and then deal with inane patients in the teaching hospital's free clinic, when he can't hide somewhere watching his soaps.

Along the way, we usually get input from Cuddy, the hospital administrator who fights to protect House from himself, despite his representing a monetary loss for the hospital, while keeping on his back about doing all his duties, especially clinic work. Then there's Wilson, House's only real friend, an oncologist who seems warm and innocent, but has his own skeletons in his closet and is inured to House's abrasive ways.

You might wonder how one could like the main character, but Laurie pulls it off magnificently, knowing exactly how far to take the character, yet still maintain humanity and the hint of compassion behind his callous and uncaring exterior. And, in a twist that surprised me, Laurie is very much British; he does a perfect American accent on the show, enough to fool the producer when he first saw Laurie's audition tape.

On the other hand, like CSI, this show takes artistic license with reality, causing real doctors some grief about how it will change the perception of doctors and medicine. Nevertheless, House, M.D. is a promising new show; let's hope it can maintain and even grow on what it has established.

Surface caught me by surprise. I'd thought I was watching all the new alien-invasion series (the other two being Threshold and Invasion), but there it was. It just ended its 15-episode first season (yeah, I wondered at that number as well), and it promises some pretty interesting stuff in the future.

Lake Bell plays Laura Daughtery, an oceanographer who while investigating a volcanic vent on the ocean floor, stumbles upon a new, large vertebrate, a new ocean species no one has ever seen before--or so she thought. Soon, she finds herself under attack from what seems to be a shadowy branch of the government, with agent Davis Lee (Ian Anthony Dale) trying to keep her quiet about her discovery. She soon meets up with the character Richard Connelly, whose brother was dragged to the sea bottom and presumably killed by one of the giant creatures. He begins to have visions, leaves his wife and two daughters, and winds up chasing the mystery around the country with Daughtery. Meanwhile, dorky young teen outcast Miles Bennett finds a cache of mysterious eggs in the sea and takes one home to hatch. When it does, he and his friend name the "lizard" Nimrod and raise the little tyke--only slowly realizing that it is not a known sea creature, as it shows the ability to create electric shocks to kill its prey. Eventually, Nim and his gigantic cousins stop being a secret; Miles starts seeing a quirky and cool girl named Savannah, whose father runs the local aquarium where Miles and Nim take up temporary residence.

Throughout the first season, we slowly see a mystery begin to unravel [moderate spoiler warning!] as we discover that the species is not the natural lost-species we thought, and that the organization hunting down Daughtery is not working for the government, but is completely independent--and possessed of some highly advanced technology it developed secretly over many decades. Now, that organization seems to have almost James-Bondian aspirations, with the new Nim-species acting as its agents. We last see the secret organization heading off on a subterranean railway to the Mariana Trench (from the Carolinas?) as a giant tidal wave crashes into the east coast of the United States.

The series does a good job of making fairly credible what should be a rather incredible plot line--giant sea monsters, a boy and his pet alien, a secret conspiracy to destroy the world, and more. You get caught up enough in the story and the mystery that you allow disbelief to be suspended sufficiently to accept it all. But one of the things I like about the series is that by the end of the first season, the world is very much changed--something that few TV shows are willing to do. Most shows that have incredible plots make it so that no one but the core cast know about it, the rest of the world remaining blissfully ignorant, either to serve the conspiracy or to 'protect' them from panic. I like the idea of a show that changes everything, and then runs with it--kind of like The 4400 also does. But there are times when you start to gag at the silliness--like when Miles visits the corpse of Nim, on ice, and Nim comes back to life--a scene stolen straight from E.T., complete with the boy and the alien having a sympathetic psychic link.

And yet, I really like the show, and can't wait for season two to begin--probably next September, possibly in the summer--though the decision about picking up the show for a second season won't be made until May. In an interesting (but not really spoiler-ish) twist, the two character groups of the show--Laura and Richard, Miles and Savannah--meet by chance in the last few minutes of the season finale, leaving a lot to be explored between the new character dynamic, made up of four strangers thrown together like a nuclear family, complete with pet lizard. Not to mention a whole new world, and a still mostly-unexplained mystery. But the nice thing about this show is that you don't feel like the writers are holding back information and doling it out with an eyedropper (like Lost or The X-Files)--things develop faster on this show, often in a more satisfying manner. Should be interesting.

And then there's My Name Is Earl, a half-hour comedy about a bad guy gone good. Earl, played by Jason Lee, is a dumb, low-life criminal who discovers karma. He steals, hurts people, commits crimes at will--and his life sucks. One day, he buys a scratch-off lottery ticket and wins a $100,000 prize--and then is promptly hit by a car, losing the ticket and landing him in the hospital. While recovering, he sees Carson Daly on TV talking about karma (he assumes Daly discovered the concept) and realizes that karma explains why his life is so bad. He figures that if he keeps on going this way, karma is gonna kill him, so he writes a list of every bad thing he's done in his life. The idea is that if he can right all his wrongs, things will go well for him.

In the show, karma is practically a character in its own right, having a strong and immediate effect, guiding Earl down the right path. It starts (when Earl vows to set things right) by depositing the wind-blown $100,000 lottery ticket at Earl's feet, Forrest Gump-style. Armed with the cash, Earl and his (even more) dim-witted brother Randy begin to work through Earl's list, one at a time, righting wrongs such as "stole car from one-legged woman," "cost dad the election," "stole beer from a golfer," and "didn't pay taxes." Other recurring characters include Earl's gold-digging slut ex-wife Joy whom Earl married while on a drunken binge, and Joy's new husband, the ever-cool-with-life Darnell, a.k.a. "Crab Man." Also along for the ride is the sexy Catalina, housekeeper at the motel where Earl and Randy now live.

It's a great set-up, and should keep the show in concepts for the next many years (there are more than 300 items on the list, and Earl sometimes has to add new ones). The show is hilarious, often spilling out into the absurd, and while the characters are often nasty, selfish and mean, Earl's new-found moral center keeps them all in check. It doesn't hurt the comedic effect that they're all dumb as cement.

One final show of note, though not a new one: Real Time with Bill Maher is back on, repeating its new-since-last-year double-set of a dozen shows each. This set is February to May, the second coming in August to November. The show, kind of like the deluxe cable version of Maher's Politically Incorrect (now with swear words!), is still usually entertaining. Unfortunately, it suffers all too much from a descent into base punditry, especially when some talking-head guest has a loud mouth and a rehearsed set of talking points. Maher never does much research and often combats the pundit with nothing more than "that just sounds wrong." Another sand-trap is when the comic-relief guest takes over the show with an irrelevant routine; maybe a little funny at first, it soon derails the rest of the show. And Maher himself will, once in a while, depart from his Libertarian core and run off on some strange tangent that will run for weeks until Maher quietly gives up on it, like giving Bush credit for bravely investing on Democracy in Iraq, or believing that it's a good thing that the NSA is spying on Americans without warrants because he lives close to the L.A. ports and is worried about being attacked.

That said, when the show works, it works well. If the guests balance right, the show can be funny, entertaining, and sometimes educational (though not often for the latter). Maher often has good guests, though he has a strange caustic-attack combined with I'll-let-you-get-away-with-selling-your-line-of-BS approach with some of the more radical guests. And Maher's "New Rules" segment is more often entertaining as not, proportionally in contrast with his middle-of-the-show funny-photo mock-up schtick which bombs more than it hits. So the show is hit-and-miss, but hits enough to keep me watching.

Holocaust Denial Laws: The Good and the Bad

British historian David Irving has been sentenced to three years in jail in Austria for denying the Holocaust. This story caught my attention because I had not known that it was a jailable offense, in any country, to disagree with a historical account.

Apparently, in 1989 Irving made two speeches and gave an interview in Austria in which he denied that Jews died in gas chambers at concentration camps during the war, alleging instead that they died of diseases like Typhus. He also claimed that Hitler was not responsible for the Holocaust and even tried to help Jews.

The law against Holocaust denial was created in 1992. I can only suppose that in Austria, one can be tried for crimes committed before the establishment of the law making something a crime.

Irving claimed that in 1991, he started to change his mind about things and did believe that gas chambers were used to kill Jews.

On one hand, the law in question seems like an excellent idea: denying the Holocaust is intrinsically dangerous, as it usually represents an approval of the policies and actions of the Third Reich, an attempt to cover them up, and signals a potential return to those horrors; call it an "enabling" of the most horrific kind of crime imaginable, popularizing the atmosphere in which such crimes were committed. At the very least, it "unlearns" the lessons of that time, making it more likely that the same crimes will be allowed to happen. Ergo the benefit of penalizing the denial, which presents a clear public harm (not to mention the visceral satisfaction of kicking around the rather disagreeable kind that put Hitler up on a pedestal).

On the other hand, such laws would also represent a precedent which goes much too far in the other direction: making it so that a disagreement with official historical accounts a criminal offense. This could easily be expanded to have the reverse effect of the Holocaust Denial laws, and strides directly into the realm of making a point of view illegal. That's where we see that the principle of a free and open society demands that we endure the cost of dangerous ideas, necessitating the will of good people to stand up and protest those ideas--but not the criminalization of any idea. As Aaron Sorkin once wrote, a democracy in which freedom and liberty is guaranteed is advanced citizenship. "It's gonna say, 'You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.'"

Maybe Austria is too scarred to allow such freedom, it's hard for me to say. But the principles of freedom of ideas, and the liberty of a point of view, however repugnant, are principles that are hard to justify breaking. And in the end, if we're going to get where we want to go as a civilization, the people are going to have to want to frown on views like Irving's. It's going to have to come from within, which means that it's better to fight with social commentary, with reason and dogged pursuit of fact, and ultimately with the winning of hearts and minds, breaking our addiction to hatred, vengeance and arrogance--instead of with the extrinsic force of law. Actions can be dealt with by statute, but wills cannot be.

The Right-Wing Media

Yet another nail in the coffin of the long-time myth about the "liberal" media. That term first came into use when a conservative survey showed that about 60% of television journalists voted Democratic, even though it did not do anything to identify those journalists' reporting as being slanted in any way. It also did not mention that fully two-thirds of all editors and publishers are conservative, and that editors and publishers, not journalists, control the political leaning of news stories and of the news outlet in general. But the myth was established, and was pounded home by the pundits, who as time went on came to have more and more of a voice in the media--and who have always been, by a vast majority, right wing, not to mention far more vitriolic and outspoken in their conservative bias.

A recent study has given more credence to this, identifying the "ideologically identifiable guests on the Sunday shows," these shows being considered political bellwethers. The study (methodology here) shows that conservatives have outnumbered liberals on the shows since the Clinton years, and now make up nearly 60% of the speakers on the shows. A more detailed look at the data (pdf file) shows that even where left-wing guests were more prominent in the second Clinton term, that ration switched to a much greater prominence of right-wing guests in Bush's term, often three times as wide a gap in favor of conservatives. And just before the war in Iraq, almost all guests are among those who approved of the war--those who voiced opposition were not asked to be on the show. While the source is biased, the data is right out there and the methodology is sound--and at the very least, this study is no less biased than the study that launched the entire "liberal media" myth in the first place.

It isn't hard to see the right-wing bias in the media. Whereas the old right-wing claim of liberal bias was always based on an abstract and never on actual observable evidence, the right-wing bias that permeates the media now is clear both statistically and observationally. Quick test: see how many right-wing pundits you can name. Write them down on a piece of paper. Then in a new column, write down all the left-wing pundits you can think of. Unless you consciously avoid watching or thinking about right-wing commentators, the right-wing list will be much longer then the left-wing list.

The New "555"

You know how in TV shows, when they want to show a phone number, it always begins with the "555" prefix so that it won't accidentally reflect a real number? Well, now it's moved on to IP Addresses as well. Not the number "555," but something less noticeable unless you know about IP addresses. On CSI Miami--a few times, so far--they've shown "IP Addresses" on-screen, and I always get a giggle out of them. Their addresses always read something like, 631.260.356.0. Which, if you know about IP, is an impossible address. Each of the four numbers in any IP address is 8-bit, which means they range from 0 to 255. So any number above 255 is impossible, you never see it.

Which is not the only thing they fake. The techno- and forensic-babble on the show might sound legit, but wait till they stray into an area which you know something about. Suddenly they'll look ridiculous. Like when they so easily "lift" separate sounds from a recording. "Get rid of that voice talking over the other voice in this recording," Hiratio will instruct, and with a single click-and-drag, the CSI will easily accommodate--in a ridiculously impossible task.

Mixed in are a few real things, to give it the sheen of legitimacy--like a laser-produced virtual keyboard.

Addendum: my father tells me that a lot of prosecutors are having to fight what is called the "CSI Effect," essentially juries who've watched and believed the shows too much, and expect far too much from the forensics that the police are actually capable of achieving in reality.

Books: Grisham from Screen to Novel

When I left home at the end of vacation recently, my father gave me three John Grisham novels to read. I had only asked for one for the airplane, but I didn't turn down the extras. I've enjoyed the movies made from his novels (The Firm, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker and The Pelican Brief), and figured it'd be interesting to see how the novels read. I was given The Broker, The Street Lawyer, and The Last Juror. They were certainly good enough. So I moved on from there.

I have a strange set of reading habits. I'll read books all the time, two or three per week, until I tire of it. Then, for another indeterminate amount of time, I'll read nothing. I tend to stay with certain authors and go through as much of their work as I can. When I was a kid, I went through science fiction that way--Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Niven, Pournelle. As a young adult, I got into Varley, Pohl, some of Zelazny (mostly the Amber series), Farmer (mostly the Riverworld series), and non sci-fi with Clavell and Clancy. Later, I got into Neal Stephenson, Brin, Chricton, Card, and others, and now Grisham. I'm leaving out a lot, but there are the highlights. Card I tore into at first, with Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Pastwatch. But then, as I started to read more of him, I quickly tired, especially of the repetitive abusive-older-brother theme. Stephenson was great for a lot more novels, like Snow Crash, Interface, and The Diamond Age, but a little during and more after Cryptonomicon, he started getting way too meandering and hard to follow. Clancy started going steeply downhill around the time of Debt of Honor, and became utterly unreadable.

Anyway, though I tend to re-read books often (a habit acquired in my early days in Japan when English-language media was scarce), I often "run out" of material, of books I want to read. So getting on to a new author is a good thing, and Grisham's got enough of a library built up to keep me busy for a while. I got back to my Amazon.co.jp account, and ordered three more--The Firm, The Runaway Jury, and The Partner. The last I've never heard of before, but the other two are movies--one I've seen, and the other one not yet. Today I finished The Firm, and found the story differences between the book and film are quite interesting. By the way, if you haven't read the book and/or seen the film, and you don't want the plot described, then do not read ahead.

Though there are, naturally, some additional scenes in the beginning, as you'd expect from a long novel translated into even a two-and-a-half-hour movie. Mitch enters the firm, gets busy, is approached by the feds, and starts scrambling to save his butt. But about halfway through the book, you can see where the filmmakers started to stray. It starts when McDeere makes the decision about what to tell his wife--he never tells her in the novel, and the reverse in the film, which changes a lot of the story after that point--and then there's a much bigger turn when, in the film, McDeere finds a way to satisfy both the FBI and the Mob, and keep his lawyer's license. In the book, that never comes up; in fact, he not only turns on the mob, he steals from them as well, big-time. A pretty big difference, one that made the entire last half of the novel completely new if you've only seen the film before.

The question is, which is better? And in a way, they both are, for their respective media. But I have to admit a preference for the film version. Though the whole "promise of you" ending was a bit too melodramatic along the lines of a Jerry Maguire ending, the rest is wrapped up into a neat package, a smart solution which keeps McDeere alive and kicking, and probably safe and in business. The solution for (and portrayal of) Ray McDeere is also more satisfying. The whole thing comes across more as a well-executed con game, at least a cleverly orchestrated plan, with the little guy playing the players at their own games and winning all around. The novel's ending seemed a bit too much of a break for the character, going from tax lawyer to millionaire outlaw sailor on the run from the Mob.

It should be interesting to do the reverse with another Grisham novel, reading The Runaway Jury first, and then seeing the movie.

The Rockford Files

I just finished watching the first season DVDs for "The Rockford Files," one of the usual set of DVDs that I buy from Amazon every Christmas when I go back to visit the family. Yeah, I know, you get it on cable where you are. I don't. And I don't like having to deal with the commercials, either.

Watching the shows brought back some things about the show that I'd forgotten about. One of those was how in almost every episode, the writers found a way to make it so that Rockford didn't get paid. While a lot of people enjoy this kind of running gag, I find it a bit annoying. An extreme example of this was with the Steve Martin/John Candy movie "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles," a film that I am sure was funny, but was about the most painful experience for me to sit through. In the film, Candy causes Martin to suffer an endless number of problems and annoyances, from the trivial to the harrowing. Essentially, Martin's character just gets beaten down and humiliated throughout the film, subjected to one setback or failure after another. Some people enjoy that, and if it's cartoonish and extreme enough I can get into it, but make it even close to realistic and it grates on me. Ergo my mild annoyance with the stick-it-to-Rockford gag--though it does make it nicer when he actually does get paid.

The other thing I'd forgotten about was how much driving there is in the series. It seems like one third of each episode is spent with Rockford driving his car around. And I'm not talking about the time spent on car chases or characters having a dialog in a car. I mean just minutes on end of watching this car go down that road, or that car turning that corner and going that way. A lot of it is one car tailing another, but sometimes it's just driving. Atmosphere, I guess. But it feels more like killing time most of the time.

Don't get me wrong--I love the series, and I'll keep getting them as they come out. The main reason is Garner himself, and the writing for the series. Rockford's sardonic and cynical style is priceless, and the driving and not getting paid aside, the plots and episode development are very, very good. One of main regrets is having to wait until the season five DVDs come out to see my all-time favorite episode "White on White and Nearly Perfect," with Tom Selleck as Lance White, the Anti-Rockford. One of the best episodes in TV history, if you ask me.

The City and the Stars

Time to recommend a book again. This time, one by Arthur C. Clarke, one of my three favorites when I was younger (Heinlein and Asimov were the other two, in case you were wondering). Arthur C. Clarke is the verbose one. His writing is poetic, polished and intelligent; reading it is like driving a really nice sports car. Furthermore, he has a talent for creating situations and environments which challenge you to embrace and encompass them, ideas that inspire awe and wonder. That said, his characters lack a certain variety, and there is a somewhat cold repetitiveness of style.

Michael Chricton exemplifies the extreme end of this flaw. While interesting, all his stories tend to be the same: a group of disparate and highly intelligent people are brought together in an environment where high technology has wrought terrible problems; they explore, theorize, discover, elucidate, and eventually about half of them die violently. The end.

Clarke is not so strikingly repetitive, but he does not range far from his base; he revisits more generalized themes and impressions. His novels tend to focus on grand, poetic mysteries, with intelligences far greater than our own, mysteries of tremendous age, artifacts of unimaginable size and scope. His protagonists tend to all be cooly rational, and even his characters with flaws tend to be calm and reasonable. His novels are about discovery, awe and grandeur.

The City and the Stars definitely fits this profile, but it does so in a fascinating way. Set in the extreme future, the billion-year-old city of Diaspar, thought to be the last remnant of mankind, is frozen in a stagnant but wondrous state. With technology that can do almost anything, the last humans live in a utopian state. Death has been beaten, and Clarke outlines a wonderful system by which these immortals can escape boredom. After a thousand years of life, a person selects which memories they wish to carry forward, and then is converted into stored energy patterns for a hundred thousand years. They awaken as a nearly-full-grown adult, but without access to their memories, and spend decades learning everything anew as a blank personality. After a certain time, their youth ends and their full memories return, and they pick up life where they left off, perhaps with a new perspective from having experienced life afresh. People are resurrected randomly enough so that they rarely encounter the same people in consecutive lives. Everything is safe and luxurious; people can indulge in any pastime or career they wish, with an endless supply of art, knowledge, and philosophy. Any item can be summoned at a thought, any adventure created in perfect simulation. The people have fallen into such an idyllic slumber that they now fear even the idea of the outside, a fear that even goes beyond the legendary past when faceless invaders beat a triumphant mankind back to its home planet, forbidding it to strike out into space again.

Of course, the story must be about the one citizen who rebels. Alvin is a curiosity: he is the first person to be born in Diaspar in ten million years, with no memories or past lives. His existence is part of a mysterious and ancient plan laid out by those who created the City, emphasized by Alvin's prime characteristic: he wants out. And that's where the story begins.

As is usual with Clarke's novels, you are offered a wealth of speculation and scenarios on grand ideas that allow you to explore issues you might never have considered before. Would you want to be immortal, considering the pitfalls? Would you pay the price? Would you be satisfied with the necessities forced by immeasurably long life? And of course, Clarke serves up grand mysteries, a billion years' worth of history for your imagination to fill in, strange planets only briefly described that you might wonder at what else exists there. He creates environments that you'd love to explore, and leave it up to you and your imagination to do so or not.

The City and the Stars is at the very least an engaging read, and along with Childhood's End, one of Clarke's best novels. Strangely, however, the novel is no longer printed by itself, but bundled with another of Clarke's books, The Sands of Mars. Why, I don't know. But it's worth it to read this story, at least.

Futurama to Return?

Oh be still, my nerdling heart. Nothing is certain, but with the return of Family Guy and the success of DVD sales, Futurama could indeed find its way back to your TV screen, at least via your DVD player. Whether it will return as a direct-to-DVD feature or as a full-fledged TV series is unclear, though I would definitely enjoy the latter. I have all the DVDs, and would gladly buy more.

For those of you who don't know about Futurama (HEATHENS!), it's an animated series made by Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. It's about Philip J. Fry, a delivery boy who, at the turn of the (current) millennium, is depressed by his fate to be a delivery boy. By chance (or maybe not), he is cryogenically frozen and awakes in the year 3000, deliriously happy to become... a delivery boy! But in the future! He immediately befriends an alcohol-fueled robot named "Bender" whose fate is to bend things, and a one-eyed alien (or maybe not) space-captain babe named Leela. He finds his great-to-the-umpteenth-time nephew, a decrepit old Professor Farnsworth, and through him the crustacean (and yet somehow Jewish) Dr. Zoidberg, the professional-limbo-dancing Rastafarian accountant Hermes, and Amy, a clutzy rich-brat exchange student from Mars. The show is just as rich with cultural gags as its cousin The Simpsons, except that all the famous people from the 20th century are now heads in jars. The series included guest voices Dick Clark, Pamela Anderson, Al Gore, Stephen Hawking, Lucy Liu, Sigourney Weaver, John Goodman, Hank Aaron, and almost the entire cast from the original Star Trek (some of them making more than one appearance).

The show was consistently funny, and remains at the top of my own list of Shows That Should Be Brought Back. And believe it or not, Starsky & Hutch, The Dukes of Hazzard, nor Miami Vice are not on that list.

A Blue-Eyed Buddhist

I've known Paul Cox (in the cyberspace sense) for quite some time, since late 2003 at the ornery.org discussion forums, and since mid-2004 as a frequent reader and commenter on this blog. He's always been more reasonable than I, looking upon the world with cynical yet fair-minded eyes. We don't always agree, but I always respect his opinions.

Recently Paul has started a personal blog, A Blue-Eyed Buddhist. It took me about five months before I committed to a full-bore entry-a-day blogging routine, but Paul is going daily right out of the gate. And his intel & analysis is very good; he provides highly detailed explanations and well-sourced and well-reasoned deliberation on matters political, social and personal. There's quite a bit of politics so far, but it is peppered with a variety of others topics, a style I enjoy (though his are probably a lot more substantial than hamster videos and eyelid twitching). And I'm not just saying all this because of what he wrote in his first entry.

I'm signing up to be a daily reader. As you may note, I have added Paul's blog to my linkboard on the right-hand sidebar on the main page, and I hope that if you come to visit here, you will visit Paul as well. It's hard to get a blog started and begin a readership, so help out, and whenever possible, please provide links to the blog elsewhere to help the site get established.

John Spencer: 1946 ~ 2005

John Spencer died of a heart attack today. If you know The West Wing, you know Spencer. He played the White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry, and he played it to perfection. You might also remember him from the later seasons of L.A. Law, and from his roles in the movies The Rock and Presumed Innocent.

His current role as Leo McGarry has become more central and significant since he was named the running mate of Jimmy Smits' character, Matt Santos. It is hard to find reports on this, but it seems that the filming for the current season is not over--perhaps another eight episodes unfilmed. Without doubt, Spencer's passing will have to be written in--and could significantly affect the series' storyline and direction. Additionally, it is reported that in the next episode to be aired in January, titled "Running Mates," Spencer's character gives this eerily premonitory statement:

"By an overwhelming percentage, the first warning symptom of a heart attack is death. I'm fortunate to be here. But it wasn't all luck. I was the beneficiary of the finest medical care in the world. Medical care available to me, to Governor Sullivan, but not to the millions of Americans with no or inadequate health insurance. They have their noses pressed against the windows of the world's greatest hospitals, best-trained doctors and nursing professionals, and when they most desperately need their services, they can't get in. Matt Santos and I don't want to leave anyone out in the cold if they get sick like I did. We want every man, woman, and child in this country to have full and equal access to the first-class treatment, that, I firmly believe, saved my life."

Spencer is also noted as having many similarities to his West Wing character, including his recovery from alcoholism, and his devotion to work over his personal life--not to mention, of course, his health.

Spencer was an only child and was not married, but did live with long-time girlfriend, actress-choreographer Patricia Mariano.

Why Do Movie Germans Have British Accents?

HBO's current series, Rome, of course has to be broadcast in English for its American audience (god forbid we should have to read subtitles). But one question some have asked is, why do the Romans speak with British accents?

This is a common phenomenon, it seems--remember all those WWII films you saw where the Germans also spoke with British accents? It seems that whenever Hollywood has a large number of cast members supposedly speaking some European language, they've gotta have Brit accents. Maybe the idea is that if a European person were to study English, they'd learn from a Briton, and therefore they'd have a British accent. Or maybe the producers just think it sounds classy. But it still comes across as strange, when you think about it.

A similar question is why actors can't be cast correctly in terms of ethnicity. I don't know how many times I've seen supposedly Japanese characters on TV shows portrayed by people who don't know any Japanese, and use incorrect accents. It can't be that hard to find actors who actually speak the language, can it?

One example is the new film, Memoirs of a Geisha, which has stirred some controversy in Asia because it uses Chinese actors to fill Japanese roles. Some Japanese are upset that Japanese actors were not used for the film, shot in California. But some Chinese are even angrier, some suggesting violence against the Chinese stars for having sold out and taken roles representing China's former imperial oppressors, from their point of view. One Chinese blogger even said, "She's sold her soul and betrayed her country. Hacking her to death would not be good enough." Well, isn't that special?

On the one hand, I suppose it's not such a big deal, and seems more than a little territorial: after all, no one would even blink if an actor of German descent played the role of a Russian, so long as they could play the role well enough. Peter Sellers played American, British, and German parts in Dr. Strangelove, and pulled it off with aplomb (though I'm not sure what native Germans might have thought of his performance). There must be countless times when European actors crossed ethnic lines, like a French actor playing an Italian (Gérard Depardieu played the Italian Columbus--though that may be a bad example), or an Italian actor playing a Spanish role, and so on and so on. So why should a Chinese actor playing a Japanese character be a problem, so long as they don't sound funny?

On the other hand, why not use actors of the right ethnicity? It can come across as the filmmakers being lazy, not caring, or even as insulting--as if, for example, Japanese actors with enough skill to play the roles could not be found.

What I'm waiting for is a movie set in Japan, filmed with a fully bilingual cast; they could shoot the film in English and Japanese (a few extra takes for dialog scenes being all that is required), and release the film in both languages without the need for dubbing or subtitles. Does anyone know if that's been done before?

Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning

This is one massively bizarre movie. If you're into Star Trek and Babylon 5, you gotta watch it. If not, you'll probably be bored and confused. Either way, if you watch it, you'll be very impressed. Not by the film's chances of getting an Academy Award for writing or acting, but for the unbelievable effort and skill put into this thing.

Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning is a fan-made film spoof of Star Trek and Babylon 5. Created by a team of five amateur filmmakers in Finland over the course of seven years, it's no run-of-the-mill video. Running one hour and forty-three minutes, it's a pretty major production with, quite frankly, stunning visual effects--the kind you'd expect in a Hollywood film. These guys went all-out in making perfect recreations of dozens of ships from their favorite sci-fi TV shows, having it out in major space battles. Anyone familiar with Trek or B5 will instantly recognize that even the smallest details are in order here.

The plot and acting, while also impressive for a fan-made film, are a bit odd, though maybe that's a cultural thing. The film is in Finnish, available with English subtitles. It follows the adventures of Captain Pirk, from a Star-Trek-like future, who becomes stranded in the present day after his ship crashes on a mission to the past. Pirk, Dwarf and Info (spoofs of Kirk, Worf and Data) get tired of trying to blend in without changing history, and when the timeline changes anyway, Pirk decides to take over the Earth and become Emperor. Using his crashed ship's technology and a Russia wanting to bring back the Soviet Union, they build a giant starship (the Enterprise from the latest movies) and conquer the planet. They then build a fleet of ships, discover a "maggot hole," and travel to an alternate universe based upon Babylon 5. Whereupon we get space battles and so on.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in this film. The conquering of Earth is played out artistically well in the fashion of an old Soviet-era propaganda film, for example. If you look carefully, you can spot several in-jokes, some based on the sci-fi series, and others on general popular culture (look for the McDonald's take-off in the Babel 13 space station, for example). But the best laughs come in the last half of the film, so if it's not funny at the start, hang on and it'll get better. The acting is fair, pretty good considering the amateur production. The plot is strange and wanders a bit at times, but is serviceable. The costumes look amateurish. There are lots of umlauts. But as I mentioned, it's the special effects that'll catch your attention on this one. The sets are either existing 21st-century sets, or are virtual sets--again, impressively done. The effects are so professional-looking, in fact, that they look out of place with the acting and costumes, as if they stole the FX from real Star Trek films.

The movie is a free download from the makers' web site, starwreck.com, using either BitTorrent or a direct download from mirror sites. You can even order the film on a DVD. The trailer is also available. Already it is the most-viewed Finnish film ever made (probably most due to the fact that it's free), without about 3 million downloads so far. I have a feeling that these guys will be getting job offers from effects studios--which may have been the idea in the first place. And I have to wonder what Straczynski (the creator of Babylon 5) and the various Trek producers must think of all this....

A Few More Shows

I figured I'd just finish off the list of new shows I'm interested in. I won't go into the CSI: New York, because essentially it's the same show as Miami or Vegas, just different characters--but then, with CSI, the characters aren't really the stars of the show. They're interesting and well-played, but the murder and the science (which is not always accurate) are the real draws there. I also won't get into the Stargate series; the original has worn out somewhat and lost a lot of magic when Richard Dean Anderson left, and the new series is too involved in the original to get into on its own. Instead, let's look first at Commander in Chief.

CinC, to save typing, can perhaps be viewed as "West Wing Lite." It centers on Mackenzie Allen (Geena Davis), a political independent, who gets drafted as a conservative president's vice president, a sop to soccer moms to bring his ticket to the center. They win, and she is more or less tossed aside. But then the president becomes gravely ill--and commands her to resign, so a properly conservative, and male, leader can be put into office to take over when the president dies. That man is Speaker of the House Nathan Templeton (Donald Sutherland), who plays the bad guy in the series. At first, Allen plans to step down, but after a particularly condescending speech to her by Templeton, she changes her mind and takes the presidency. Her husband and three kids are dragged along into it with her, and play a big part in the series.

It's really West Wing Lite because it centers more on sketchy and sometimes corny melodrama rather than on real issues. And for a series that pretends to be about empowering women, you know that if the character were a man, his family would not be as central to the storylines--the focus on the family seems less a happenstance or an independent choice, and more a matter of she's-a-woman-so-we-have-to-have-her-family-involved-more. But the real failure of this series is the cardboard nature of everything--the characters, the issues, and the situations. Everything is stark but not deep. The husband is pressed into service as the First Gentleman, but the situation is unrealistic and forced--at first, people seem to assume that he'll be picking out linen swatches and deciding what's on the menu for dinner, and his desire to press his manly role is similarly overemphasized. The problems the kids have are also exaggerated and oversimplified. The same can be said for the situations this president meets. Sutherland as Templeton is a classic mustache-twirler, taking every chance to shoot Allen down, stabbing her in the back while claiming to be all lightness and sweet. The issues presented by the circumstances faced are glossed over, not delved into like The West Wing does.

But the worst flaw is the infallibility of the main character. Obstacles are thrown up almost to the point of being comical, and yet every situation is dealt with adeptly and successfully. This president always lucks out and never loses. It always works out in the end. And at the end, we end up learning almost nothing about the issues presented. Aaron Sorkin could make an episode of The West Wing about something as mundane as the census, and manage to make it funny, intriguing, engaging, and informative. CinC struggles to achieve half that, and doesn't seem to even attempt the other half.

I'll keep watching it for a while though--series creator Rod Lurie is stepping aside, and successful Steven Bochco (L.A. Law, NYPD Blue) is coming in as the show runner; it'll be worth it to see if the show can get better than this.

The other show is an unqualified hit: Boston Legal. Despite the strength of the secondary characters, Candice Bergen and Rene Auberjonois, the real stars are James Spader and William Shatner. Spader, introduced on another David E. Kelley show, The Practice, is brilliant in the extremely well-written and -conceived role of Alan Shore. Shore is a rude, gallant, saintly evil, sexually forceful, hedonistic and completely uninhibited silver-tongued attorney, a mass of weaknesses, strengths, and seeming contradictions, prone to burst out joyfully in completely inappropriate behavior. Shore is one of the best characters to come to television in a long time, a character who is endlessly entertaining and promises to be deep and complex--and they got the best actor possible for the role.

Just Spader himself would be enough to make the series worthwhile, but they got an added bonus: William Shatner. Now, I'm not the biggest Shatner fan, but one thing you have to admit, the man has a brilliant sense of his own absurdity and can play it to comic effect to no end. In this series, he plays Denny Crane (motto: "Denny Crane!"), a delightfully arrogant, bombastic, narcissistic, dyed-in-the-wool conservative, an over-the-top male chauvinist, gun-toting, homophobic fuddy-duddy with a combination of mental acuity and fuzziness, the latter brought on by either Alzheimer's or Mad Cow Disease (he prefers the latter). Shatner plays the role to the hilt, but the role is reigned in to the perfect degree by the writers. Crane, in the hands of different writers or another actor, would be ludicrous and unappealing, but with this team, Crane is human and endearing, not to mention hilarious.

Everyone else helps a good deal, but Spader and Shatner make the show. If you aren't watching it, pick it up.

More in the Genre

Earlier I commented on the mystery genre that seems to be catching on, as expressed by The 4400 and Lost--TV shows which revolve around some enigmatic secret, alien or supernatural. There are two new entries this year, most likely given the green light after the roaring success that Lost has enjoyed.

One is titled Invasion, and follows two related families living in Florida after a hurricane hits. During the storm, a great many orange lights emerge from the ocean depths; many people go missing, to turn up nude and apparently unharmed--but, we are to assume, either possessed or cloned, evidently unaware that they are any different than they were before. As time goes on, the orange lights creep up on more people from the flood waters, and seemingly take them over as well.

The main character is Russell Varon, a U.S. Park Ranger; his ex-wife, a doctor who is now married to the town's sheriff, seems to be one of the first to have been 'taken' or 'changed' or whatever. They share their two children, while Russell lives also with his new wife, a TV reporter, and her paranoid, conspiracy-seeking brother.

So far, very little has been made clear, about what the orange lights are, whether people are really possessed, what the eventual plans are, etc. It's mostly been character stories and a lot of X-Files-style running around but at the end of the day you're no wiser. I'm sticking with the show for the time being, primarily because of Executive Producer Tommy Schlamme, a veteran of The West Wing. I'd like to see what he's got for this show, but up until now I'm not exactly entranced; it's the show I'm most likely to stop watching unless it gets better.

The other show is Threshold, which I like a great deal more. One of the producers on this show is Brannon Braga, formerly of the Star Trek series; Braga's reputation from Trek was less than stellar, but his presence will not persuade or dissuade me in terms of sticking with the show. This one's appeal is from the writing, the characters, and the premise. It's no Lost, but it's a more than acceptable show.

The basic premise is that an alien ship, operating in four spatial dimensions, comes to earth and encounters a fishing boat in the Atlantic. The craft or probe, constantly shifting in shape and emitting a sound like knives scraping against each other, sends out a complex signal that has a disturbing effect: with some people, it immediately and hideously mutilates them physically, killing them. With others, it changes their DNA into a triple-helix, and retasks them to spread the alien signal to as many other humans as possible. Their physical strength, endurance and self-healing abilities skyrocket, and they appear to have the ability to move through higher physical dimensions.

The cast of the show is a crisis management team working for the U.S. government, assigned to fight the alien threat, if that's what it is (and seems to be). Led by Molly Caffrey, the team consists of an unlikely collection of specialists, including a strongly libertarian medical doctor named Fenway, played by Brent Spiner (Data of Star Trek: TNG); Ramsey, a jaded four-foot-six-inch super-genius; Lucas, a shy, dorky engineer; and Cavenaugh, a typical strong-guy security man. The team is directed by J.T. Baylock, played by veteran actor Charles S. Dutton.

Each episode deals with a newly-reported outbreak of the alien signal or the infection of the triple-helix physiology. Some people are only partially exposed to the signal, and appear unchanged (no DNA mutations, no retasking of purpose), but seem to have a psychic link to the fully exposed infectees, and share a dream in which they walk through a forest of glass "trees," spying only obscurely an possibly alien figure lurking in the background. Molly, Cavenaugh, and Lucas are exposed from the very beginning when they watch a videotape of the alien craft shot by one of the infectees on the fishing boat; they have the dreams, but otherwise seem unaffected.

The cast is interesting and work well together, and the writing is good. Still, as with Invasion, it is too early to tell if it will grow into something good (both shows have only eight episodes broadcast so far). But Threshold has a much better chance to become something interesting. So we'll wait and see.

The Mystery Shows

With some of the old series I watched having shut down, I started looking for something new, and sampled several series. There are some good ones out there. Here are a few details on the ones I started picking up, all of them related after a fashion:

The 4400: A show that started a little back, it has gone through two "seasons" already--but nowadays, the term "season" seems to mean something other than what it used to. Shows in the 70's often ran 30 episodes a season; Star Trek: The Next Generation ran 26. Nowadays, major network shows only get 22 (except for the show 24, for obvious reasons). But cable shows, The 4400 among them, only seem to get 12 or 13 per year. The 4400's first "season" was a 6-hour miniseries, which was followed by a second "season" of 12 episodes. Nevertheless, it makes up for in quality what it loses in quantity.

The series began with a comet about to hit the Earth and wipe out all life--except it wasn't a comet. It slowed down, descended upon Washington State, stopped above a lake, and exploded in a flash of light--leaving precisely four thousand, four hundred people standing on the shore of the lake. The 4,400 people had been plucked off the face of the Earth, one by one, over sixty years. Some sixty years ago, some just a few years ago, most in-between--and none had aged a day from when they were taken. None remembered where they had been or what had happened to them. Kept in quarantine at first, the government could not find anything wrong or changed about them, and so released them into the general population. And then they started changing. Some exhibited strange powers, making the show kind of a cross between Close Encounters, Taken, and The X-Men. At the end of the first "season," we learn (maybe) where they were, but are no closer to understanding exactly what's supposed to be happening.

The main character of the show is a government agent whose whose son went into a coma when his cousin (the main character's nephew) was taken. He and his partner are one of many teams keeping tabs on the 4400, who still cluster around Seattle, as their powers get them into trouble, and the rest of the population start getting scared and suspicious of what they are. The show is pretty well written, and though the characters are good, the mystery and how the show handles it are the key to its success.

The 4400 is one of a new crop of shows that centers around a mystery. The X-Files could be seen as the progenitor of this genre, with its arc of government-hidden alien invasion conspiracy providing a central mystery that the show revolves around--"The Truth Is Out There." Another recent show in the genre is:

Lost: Now in its second season (this show has been granted 24 full hours per year), Lost is the biggest hit among the Mystery Shows. A plane headed from Australia to the U.S. goes off course then crashes on what seems to be a deserted island. There are more than 40 survivors from the middle section; the forward and tail sections of the plane crashed elsewhere. The main cast of the show is made up of 14 of those people (the others not so clearly defined, named, or countable until they are needed as supporting characters). The 14 include: Jack, a doctor; Kate, a fugitive; Sawyer, a con man; Locke, an older man who seems to know everything; Sayid, a former member of the Iraqi Republican Guard; Jin and Sun, a Korean couple; Hurley, a dude whose life has been bizarre lately; Mike and Walt, estranged father and son reunited just before the crash; Claire, a woman 8 months pregnant; Charlie, a rock and roll star; and Boone and Shannon, step-brother and -sister.

Lost is a good show more because of the characters and the incredibly strong writing, though the mystery at the core of the show is a very close third. The ensemble cast each have roles with depth, strong backstories that each get the spotlight in alternating episodes. Every episode centers on one cast member, following the adventures of all on the island while looking closely at one character's past in flashbacks; the flashbacks are responsible for demonstrating the character's motivations and feelings, showing why they act they way they do.

The mystery at the center of the show is the island itself. From the very start, it shows itself to be an incredibly weird place. Despite being in the South Pacific, polar bears attack, and some mysterious creature that seems to be a cross between a dinosaur and a piece of demolition equipment crashes down trees and chases people, sometimes catching them and killing them. A strange radio transmission has been emanating from the island for decades. Others live on the island, but who they are and why they are there is unexplained. Strange things are found in the jungle, and strange things happen to the characters--visions, coincidences, all manner of surprises. And oh yeah, the writers have no problem killing off main characters--two have already bitten the dust. But not to worry--more are being added. All good.

While the mystery is very good, the show does have one notable shortcoming, though not too bad: it goes out of its way to avoid looking at certain things. A few times, mysteries arise that seemingly could be solved by asking someone something, but no one asks. Certain characters hold back information for no discernible reason. Things are encountered, but people don't take as close a look at them as they could. It's as if the writers are bending the rational behavior of characters so as to dangle mysteries closer in front of us without giving anything away. This is the one frustrating weakness to an otherwise excellent show. But one gets the impression that the show can only go too far before the tension of not revealing enough goes beyond the breaking point. Hopefully, this show will not suffer the same illness that The X-Files did, which was to hold back truth and revelations far longer than the believability of the premise could support, so that the show's concept became stretched and inaccessible. We'll have to see how Lost does.

There are two more shows in this genre, copycats of Lost undoubtedly; they are Threshold and Invasion. I'll get to those next.

Hee hee

Apparently, Fox News Channel sent a reporter out to do a special on global warming, and the documentary formed around the idea that global warming actually is happening. The reporter said it thus:

"After months of research and interviews with many experts, I've learned this simple fact: The earth is heating up. And it's happening much faster than ever before. No one can argue with this."

Reportedly, Fox chairman Roger Ailes was "charmed" by the reporter and thus did not smite him nor the documentary. But conservative wonk Chris Horner was aghast, to the point where he uttered this hilarious whopper:

"While it is unfathomable that a reputable news network would air so blatantly a one-sided program regardless of any disclaimer, that the 'fair and balanced' network would put itself in the position of suspending its motto is stupefying."

Yes! Imagine that! Fox News, for the first time in history, is going to air something that is not fair and balanced! Alert the media! Run for the hills! To the Bat Cave, Robin! It's a sign of the Coming of Days, the end of the world!

In all seriousness, this is groundbreaking in that Fox is, apparently for the first time, airing a show in which the right-wing slant does not heavily predominate, and that does seem significant. I wonder what Ailes was smoking when he made that decision.

The Video iPod, or vPod

So the predictions were right, and it was a video iPod that Apple came out with today (along with some new iMacs, which was less predicted). And there's a lot of hoopla about the video, in that you can download not only movie previews and music videos, but TV shows as well--in particular, Lost and Desperate Housewives. (It seems pretty clear that Jobs used his Pixar influence on Disney to open up their video vault to Apple for this.) The price: $2 an episode, or $35 per season. Not bad pricing, similar to a DVD set. And like with music on iTunes, you can download them to your iPod (if you have the new video iPod, of course) for portable viewing; you can share them between five computers; and you can burn them onto a CD for safekeeping.

Sounds good, doesn't it? However, most people who have checked the details aren't too impressed, and I'm one of them. First of all, how impressive is video on a 2.5-inch screen? Not very. If you don't mind a tiny picture in exchange for watching TV on the train, then OK. But I don't think many will really be wowed by that, at least not consistently. And with the iPods already bearing color screens, who didn't fully expect them to go video at some point? The bigger draw for videophiles would be the ability to watch video on one's computer, and perhaps hook it up to the TV for viewing.

The key advance here is the TV and movie downloads (the music videos are a step, but a small one). It would mean that video is going the way of music: instead of downloading TV shows and movies via BitTorrent or other piracy networks, people could download them via iTunes and pay a nominal fee for it. It would be a great alternative for people like me living overseas where some media takes forever to get here. The pricing scheme is just about right (on the high side of "right," however). Buying a DVD set would have advantages, like the special features (commentary, subtitles, special videos, outtakes, etc.), but the iTunes version would allow for immediate downloads of the episodes a day after they air--on-demand availability that will be key for a true video downloading paradigm.

There is one big caveat, however, and it will be a deal-breaker for most, including myself: video quality. If you go to Apple's web page for the new video feature, they studiously avoid mentioning anything about the video quality on a computer screen, aside from the highly misleading claim that the video are in "high-quality, H.264 QuickTime format." That's misleading, because people will think that "high quality" refers to the size of the video. It doesn't. HDTV quality is 720 pixels tall on a computer screen. 480 pixels tall is commensurate with non-HDTV size, and would look great on a normal TV screen. But that's not what you get with the new videos--instead, it will be 240 pixels tall, and 320 wide (see image at top of this entry as an example). That's 1/2 of regular video, and 1/3 of HDTV. You pay for the DVD, for example, the 1st season of Lost, and not only is the quality much higher, but you get a truckload of special features to boot, and the price is only $4 more.

Apple and Disney would have to make the quality a lot better and the special features present before a lot of people will buy into this. Right now it has more curiosity appeal than anything else, but that will soon pass. One can only assume that the small video size is mostly to guard against piracy. OK, fair enough. But you're probably going to drive more people to the pirated videos, which can be downloaded in 720-pixel HDTV format, and the DVD special features are often available for download as well. People who already pirate won't be tempted to go legit, and some people who were not aware of video downloads on demand actually might be attracted to the idea but will want more quality and could be led to download the content from BitTorrent instead.

That's why the iTunes music sales model has worked so well: the quality is as high as or higher than the pirated stuff, and it's easier to get. If the iTunes Music Store provided music with low-quality audio, no one would buy it. If Apple and Disney really want to fight video piracy, they have to offer something at least as good or even better than BitTorrent. Not worse.

Another Good Read

This one is better if you're already into science fiction, but god overall as well. It comes from a writing duo, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. together, they wrote books such as Footfall (elephantine aliens invade the Earth) and Lucifer's Hammer (comet hits the Earth), but their best collaboration is The Mote in God's Eye, written in 1974.

It's one of those books with a very detailed, background rich environments that usually strengthens a good story, not as rich as Dune, but certainly deep enough to make a big difference. A thousand years in the future, humanity has regressed from its zenith of the First Empire, though it still capable of space travel using something called the Alderson Drive. The drive uses gravitational lines of influence between stars to allow for a jump from one system to another. No alien species are encountered, however.

New Caledonia, a human colony on the far side of the Coalsack Nebula has been isolated from most of humanity for some time due to wars. During that time, something strange is observed. From the colony, the Coalsack Nebula resembles a hooded man, and two stars--a red giant and its yellow-dwarf companion, appear as the Eye of the man, with the yellow dwarf seeming to be a mote in the eye. But suddenly and inexplicably, the Mote turns bright green--and the green light is coherent. In other words, laser light. After many years, the light gets brighter and brighter, and then suddenly it just turns off. Because of the war, scientific observations are not possible, and the change gets passed down into folklore.

Then, 145 years later an alien probe enters New Caledonia space using a solar sail. When the probe is intercepted, the alien occupant is found dead. But that occupant is bizarre: it is asymmetrical, with one powerful arm on the right, and two delicate ones on the left; a large bat-like ear on the left, a single teat on the right. Its mouth is fixed as if in a smile.

A ship is sent to explore the origin of the craft, which is problematic because the exit point of the interstellar jump to the red giant is within the star itself. It can be done using a special shield, but it also explains why the aliens had to use a solar sail, beyond just lacking the technology: there is only one jump pathway between their world and the universe, and it requires a ship to pass through the red giant's atmosphere.

The human ship successfully makes the transit and enters the alien system, and that's where you'll have to pick it up. The alien race created by Niven and Pournelle is wild and fascinating--and more than just a little scary. There are a lot of secrets, a lot of mysteries about the race, and it is a great deal of fun to see it all revealed over time. The aliens--Moties, as they are called in the book--are very likable, at least the ones you meet. There's a good deal of exploration, intrigue, and action involved.

If you read Footfall, don't worry--the aliens in Mote are a lot better drawn than those in the alien-invasion novel. And if you're not a huge Larry Niven fan (or if you've noticed that his latest novels are almost bizarrely discordant), again not to worry, Pournelle tempers Niven's style; the two make a good combination.

There is a sequel to Mote, titled The Gripping Hand (named after the strong, single right arm that Moties possess), which is good, but not as good as its predecessor, as is so often the case with sequels. But the original is one of the top ten science fiction books I would recommend.

Good Read #2: To Your Scattered Bodies Go

Hmm. Can't seem to locate my copy of Startide Rising, so for today I'll blog on a different Good Read. This one is by a science fiction writer not too many have heard of: Philip José Farmer. The book: To Your Scattered Bodies Go.

The basic plot is a startling one: after dying, every human that ever lived awakens on the banks of a great river. Everyone who dies after the age of five is there. You're there. But we don't appear on the river chronologically, resurrected immediately after we perish on Earth. Instead, every human from every age, from the Neanderthals to the 21st century (supposedly the Earth is destroyed in 2008, so better get ready!) is resurrected upon the River at the same time. Everyone awakens unclothed, hairless, with perfectly-formed bodies at the peak of youth--with absolutely no clue as to what happened or why we are there. There are no buildings (at least at first), no signs of civilization except for two things: everyone has a large metal "grail" or closed container attached to their wrists by a transparent strap, and regularly spaced along the length of the river are 50-foot-wide, 5-foot-tall "grailstones," mushroom-shaped constructs with holes along their tops. At any given location, there is a majority of people from one time and geographic location on Earth; a minority from another time and place; and a remainder of peoples from any number of times and places.

Naturally, as everyone awakens at once, having just died, most people completely freak out. Waking up young, nude and shorn on a riverbank is not what most people expected in an afterlife.

The story follows the perspective of Sir Francis Richard Burton (the British explorer, not the film star), from his death to his premature awakening in a preparation area, to his awakening on the river and his adventures thereafter. He quickly teams up with a Neanderthal named Kazz, a young American writer named Peter Frigate (who happens to be a Burton biographer, not to mention the avatar of author Farmer), a woman named Alice Hargreaves, who was the model for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and an alien calling himself Monat Grrautut from Tau Centauri, claiming to be the one who destroyed the Earth.

Soon, many facts about the River world become apparent: the River stretches from one pole of the world to another; there is a riverbank on each side a mile or two deep before unclimbable mountains bar one from traveling north or south. That's all the world is, unending river valleys, spiraling and winding throughout the entire world; to go north or south, one must circumnavigate the globe along the valley to reach the next valley over. There are few if any natural resources.

There are also no farms, and aside from fish in the River, no natural source of food. The grails, however, when placed in depressions in the grailstones, are granted three meals a day; at set times, energy flares like lightning shoot up from the stones, and any grails set into them are suddenly filled with a meal and other treats (the first filling providing clothes and other amenities). Only the owner of a grail is able to open it. It soon becomes clear that the world is an artifact, constructed for the purpose of resurrecting all of humankind and keeping them alive--for a reason completely unknown. The makers, whoever they may be, do not show themselves or give any clue as to who they are or what they want.

But no one can escape one fact: they have been given a second chance at life. And a third, a fourth, and more: if a person is killed on the Riverworld, they are again resurrected the following morning--somewhere else along the River, at random.

Farmer takes this grand concept and uses it well; we meet a host of people, from ordinary to famed to pretenders to fame (if someone declares they are Jesus and no one knows them, who can dispute it?). Societies quickly form, miniature nations, often in line with the majority society resurrected at that point of the river. Naturally, many of them are brutal, and "grail slavery," where one is held in bondage while masters hoard the lion's share of your grail offerings, crops up almost everywhere. There is great suffering and chaos, wars and attempts at power and empire--and the ever-present question of, who created this place and why are they allowing this to happen?

Sir Richard Burton is determined to find out, and vows to travel to the head of the river at the pole of the world, a daunting task even if the world were not filled with territoriality, greed, and violence. And dogging him all the way is no one other than Hermann Göring, of all people. Along the way, we meet all kinds of people, in this book and the sequels, including King John of England, Cyrano de Bergerac, Odysseus, Tom Mix, Jack London, Ulysses S. Grant, and Baron Von Richtoven, among many others.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go is the first in a series of five novels by Farmer, and is followed by The Fabulous Riverboat, where Samuel Clemens is aided by a Mysterious Stranger to find the resources necessary to build a powerful steamship to ply the great river; The Dark Design, catching up with Burton and his accomplices; The Magic Labyrinth, a climax where the pole is reached and the answers to the Riverworld are discovered; and Gods of Riverworld, the post-climax novel (Farmer was probably as enticed by another assured paycheck as he was encouraged by the fans for this one) where Burton and company find themselves having everything they want, and discover that it's not all they thought it would be.

The book series is a fascinating adventure into a variety of cultures, customs, philosophies and personalities. Unless you have a specific personal distaste for some element of the general storyline, the books are easy to get hooked on, prompting you to get your hands on the full set and see what happens and what it's all about. It might reassure you to know that Farmer does in fact give you all the answers in the end; it's not just some tease where the writer abandons you after you've committed yourself. You learn who built the world and why, and a lot more. It stands as one of my more unusual favorite book series.

Looking for Good Reads?

A friend at work recently asked for a recommendation for a good book, and I thought it might make for a few good entries to mention novels I think would be generally enjoyed. If you're looking for something good to read and haven't gotten to these ones yet, given them a try. A caveat: I basically read science fiction. However, I will suggest only books which I believe do not require you to be a science fiction fan.

Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, by Orson Scott Card, tops my list. It's right up there with Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, also by Card. While I disagree rather sharply with his politics, and do not like all of his writings, Card at his best is something you do not want to miss.

Pastwatch is set in the future at a time when the world is recovering from environmental disaster, and technology is advanced so that anything in the past can be observed. Beginning crudely, without sound and with blurry vision, and developing to audio-visual devices with highly accurate and perceptive capabilities, the Pastwatch machines allow observers to watch the lives of people centuries and millennia gone. The purpose is akin to the old saying that those who have no past have no future; the Pastwatch project is supposed to map the development of mankind in the past, discovering where we have been for the benefit of those to come.

But if you think that this book is going to be all about time machines, time warps, causality loops, and paradoxes, you're mistaken; Card's science fiction is less about technology and science, and more about people--their motivations, their histories, their ways of seeing and understanding who and what they encounter. Science is well in the background, humanity is in the forefront. Card also defines history most sensibly as the story of people, and uses the characters in his novel to show how the individual and the way each of us looks at the world in turn shapes the world. One of the characters in the novel, for example, named Tagiri, watches a woman from an ancient time at the time of the woman's death, and sees a sadness, the cause of which she feels compelled to discover. So she works backwards through the woman's life, seeing effect first, and searches for the cause. This not only teaches her a new technique for learning the story of a life, but leads to a grander search: the source of the woman's sadness was that her son was sold into slavery, which becomes a new focus of her own line of study--and, in time, a focus of the novel itself.

While the strongly character-driven story is this novel's most potent feature, it is not the only one. Another is the review of history and the intriguing possibilities of what might or might not have happened if Christopher Columbus had acted differently. Card's thorough research shows, and not just in the lengthy bibliography in the back of the book, but in the detail in his telling of history, and his fascinating speculation as to what might have been, where the world might have become radically different had one person moved in this way or that.

And what must-read book would be complete without stunning twists? Card has two of them in this story, fascinating events which turn the story in new directions and send chills down your spine as you consider the ramifications. Well, for me, at least they did. You'll have to decide that for yourself when you read it.

Next time: Startide Rising.

Battlestar Galactica

I never thought I'd be saying this, but Battlestar Galactica is a very good television show.

By this, of course, I mean the current version of the show being broadcast on the Sci-Fi channel, not the original 1980 version which was a poorly-produced half-assed attempt to cash in on the Star Wars craze. I don't know how they can actually sell DVD sets of that series. Even being the sci-fi fan that I am, I wouldn't watch it again even if it were a free download. To me, it was pretty much a how-to manual on how not to make a sci-fi series. Everything from the kid with his robot dog to the endlessly-recycled poor special effects, the show was a loser, and quite forgettable.

The new show is almost the polar opposite of the original. It was well-constructed, is well-written and well-produced. Somehow they got two very respectable actors, Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell, to head up the cast, and filled in the rest with good people, though relatively unknown. The general storyline is, surprisingly, very close to the original--a robotic race called the Cylons attack twelve human colonies on twelve worlds; survivors flee in ships around the last remaining (or so it is thought) battle cruiser, which leads them on a journey to a mythical world called Earth. But the new version throws in twists and new angles that make the series less about cashing in and more about drama and storytelling.

One angle is that the Cylons have produced a new model which looks entirely human, and can be programmed to think its a human while the machine mind sleeps underneath, ready to take over at any time. When one of these human-Cylon hybrids is killed, their memories are uploaded to a Cylon database and a new copy of the individual is made. This introduces story angles including paranoia and distrust, as well as the question of what being human is, in a sinister kind of way.

Another angle is politics; where in the original series, Commander Adama (played by Lorne Greene) ruled everything, here there is a war of control between him and the emergency civilian administration, where the president (played by Mary McDonnell) used to be the education minister, but has taken strong hold of the reins. Richard Hatch, who played Apollo, Adama's son, in the 80's series, is back as Tom Zarek, a political dissident angling to become the new leader of the what's left of the human race.

One more angle is faith: there is a certain amount of mysticism involved, including a religion with a prophecy which the characters would appear to be playing out. How much of it is real, how much of it is self-fulfilling, and how much of it is simply manufactured by the Cylons, who seem to have a mysterious faith of their own?

The characters in this series are also very three-dimensional. Olmos plays Adama as a tough, gruff, but wise take-control military man, unwilling to believe in legends and prophecies, but human enough to realize when he's wrong. He is perhaps the least-flawed of all the characters, with the exception of his son, now named Lee, who is more about doing what's right than adhering to loyalty or even the chain of command. But more interesting are the more flawed characters.

Dr. Baltar (played by John Colicos in the original series, and thoroughly re-imagined here), is a quirky genius who unwittingly gave the Cylons access to allow them to wipe out humanity; this was done through a female Cylon-human hybrid who seduced him, and told him of his culpability when the nuclear weapons started going off. In an interesting twist, even after leaving this female Cylon behind on the bombed-out colony, he still sees her with him everywhere, as if she were real; he can see her, hear her and even feel her, though she is only in his mind and nobody else knows she's there. But she's there to him, constantly cajoling, threatening, seducing and leading him on--and the viewer is left to guess whether she's somehow been implanted into his brain, or if she's simply a schizophrenic hallucination he's built up to avoid the horrendous guilt of having been responsible for billions of deaths. Everyone else trusts him; he's in charge of finding disguised Cylons, he's made vice-president of the civilian government, and he's either mad, compromised, or both.

Starbuck is no long Dirk Benedict, nor is she male; but she's still the best pilot, along with being inventive and highly skilled at other things. But she's got a checkered past, and has big issues with authority. She tends to be the smartass to Lee Adama's straight-man routine, and leaves you wondering where she'll go next. Lieutenant Boomer also went from male to female in this series, this time a pilot who is not quite sure who she is, and for a while, neither are you.

President Roslin, played by McDonnell, is dying of breast cancer. She unwillingly takes on the role of president, but takes it by the throat and will not let go. Eventually she becomes obsessed with the prophecy which she believes she is destined to carry out, and makes certain compromises she feels are necessary but is not comfortable with. Her character is endlessly driven, and McDonnell plays it well. On the other end of the dedication scale is Adama's first officer, Colonel Tigh. An alcoholic with a scheming, manipulative wife, he is portrayed as both talented and as a pathetic loser, desperately hanging on to a raging tiger by his fingernails, doing his best but being less than effective.

The series began with a miniseries back in 2003, followed by a truncated 13-episode "first season," and now by a second season that will take a hiatus from late September to early January. If you haven't been watching it, you should go back to the beginning and do so, if possible. The series is popular with the BitTorrent community, and may be re-viewable there.

Adding to the interest to a certain degree is that the producer, Ron Moore, does a weekly podcast commentary on the episode, just like on DVDs. If you record the show or have a recording of it, you can play the podcast and watch the show with the sound off at the same time, and it's just like a DVD commentary--except it's an ongoing broadcast TV show. As far as I know, this is the first time that's ever been done. It is, however, very much in the style of Babylon 5's Joe Straczynski, who in the 90's communicated quite a bit with fans online. Moore similarly answers a lot of questions by fans, though a lot less frequently.

Altogether, this is a series to be taken far more seriously than its predecessor, with far greater human interest and far better storytelling. Even the special effects, while uncontrolling and relatively unobtrusive, are quite impressive, especially for a low-budget TV show on a cable channel. Kudos to Ron Moore and the Sci-Fi Channel on this one.

Red Thunder

I just got finished with John Varley's Red Thunder. It's a pretty good book.

Naturally, with the plot of a recovering-alcoholic ex-astronaut and four teenage kids making a spaceship to beat the Chinese to Mars, one must suspend a certain amount of disbelief. A large part of that is the acceptance of the ex-astronaut's eccentric-genius cousin's invention of a multi-dimensional space drive out of spare video game parts. But Varley does a good job of making the character both eccentric and interesting enough that you forgive that rather outrageous and necessary story twist. Once you get past that, it's a hell of a lot of fun.

The story is told from the viewpoint of one Manuel Garcia, a youth of Cuban descent in Florida. He and his friend Dak, a young black man with an affinity for race cars and who shares Manuel's dream of becoming an astronaut, and their respective girlfriends, the beautiful, business-savvy Kelly and the health-conscious Alicia, run into (or over) former astronaut Travis Broussard, through whom they meet the awkward but lovable Cajun Einstein, Jubal. All are put off that the nasty Chinese are going to land on Mars, so they decide to do something about it.

Varley goes to lengths to make the story more plausible, but in the end, the fascinating characters he creates make it worthwhile to just go along with the gag and accept all the implausibilities. And, reading the story, you get a sense of how to really make a spaceship right--right down to the freezer full of pizzas and the espresso machine. The details throughout the novel make you laugh, but the situations, reactions and decisions involved are what make the book more memorable, from the somewhat-exciting (but a bit hard-to-follow) action/danger sequences, to the occasional laugh-out-loud coverage of how things work out. I won't give any away, I'll just state that you will very likely enjoy them as much as I did.

Heinlein fans will undoubtedly get a kick out of the story, too. It is, in fact, more or less a modern re-make of Heinlein's youth-fiction novel Rocket Ship Galileo, the plots being remarkably similar--from the mixed-background youngsters teaming up with an older authority figure who gets the spaceship project going, right up to the government agents arriving at the scene just as they're about to lift off.

But Galileo was not the only of Heinlein's work that Varley borrowed from (just as he did, heavily, in Steel Beach, another very good read). In Red Thunder, you can see elements from Heinlein's Between Planets (the mirrory sphere-force field-slash-space drive), Time for the Stars (surveys of close-by Earth-type planets and missions sent out to them), Stranger in a Strange Land (the name "Jubal"), Have Spacesuit–Will Travel (getting and fixing up old space-suits for a trip into space)--and of course, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. The main character is Manuel Garcia and his girlfriend is named Kelly--a clear reference to Harsh Mistress's protagonist, Manuel Garcia O'Kelly, his introduction at one point as "Manny, my best friend," and the reference near the end in terms of his age upon reflection of events also matches up. There are likely more references I missed--though interestingly, I believe there were no references to one Heinlein novel that should have been a natural: Red Planet. But maybe the reference is there, in a location on Mars or some character's name. The Heinlein references run thick, but I liked Heinlein, too, and that makes them fun to find. If you don't know Heinlein, you won't be confused--you just won't catch the references.

If you like Varley and/or Heinlein, you'll like this book--and if you can suspend your disbelief enough, you'll like it anyway. Just about anything Varley writes is good and worth reading.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I got the book last Saturday morning, and had it finished by Sunday afternoon. I haven't commented on it yet so as to give the readers of this blog time enough to get through the book before I reviewed it.

One of the hurdles I had in reviewing this book were the inevitable comparisons to my brother's own continuation from The Order of the Phoenix, a continuation my brother already followed through the seventh year of Harry at Hogwarts, and beyond. After having read even the first of my brother's novels, I knew I'd have a tough time trying to figure out which was better.

In the end, I choose my brother's Veil of Mystery over Rowling's Half-Blood Prince. I'll try to go into the details here, though any spoiler information for Rowling's book will go below the fold (if you are reading this in the archives, it's all here in one piece).

This is not to say that I didn't like The Half-Blood Prince; I did find it entertaining. However, it was not as good as it could have been, either for my brother's prose or for Rowling's herself.

A few things one has to take into account for the Harry Potter books is that Rowling's style is toward caricature, brooding, and more than a bit into darkness. Her characters tend to act in extremes, to the extent of often seeming unreasonable. Harry's brooding in The Order of the Phoenix was more than most would have felt reasonable, even for a 15-year-old. Snape's cruelty has always been almost cartoonish, as have Malfoy's nasty sneers and cowardly bullying. But then again, we are dealing with children's literature, so this can be excused--though for that genre, there is more than a little of the usual touch of darkness. In the first book, Harry had to face his parents' murderer, grafted onto the back of a professor's head, and when he touched the villain's face, it crumbled into ashes. Kinda dark stuff for kids--but maybe that's a big reason why it's so popular.

In that respect, Rowling is in usual form in The Half-Blood Prince. Harry's upset a lot again, Ron and Hermione are going to extremes to tick each other off, and Dumbledore is amiable yet mysteriously reticent. We learn more about Voldemort. There's a mystery afoot, misleading clues abound, and a truth is revealed at the end. These aren't spoilers--this could describe most if not all of the Potter books.

There are a few inconsistencies, however. For example, Rowling departs from her long-held writing style of third-person limited (writing about Harry in the third person, but limiting the action solely to what Harry himself experiences). The first two chapters of the new book center on events completely outside of Harry's experience; after the third chapter begins, however, we again pick up with Harry's limited point-of-view. This is a strange stylistic departure, especially given the nature of the opening chapter, when we learn of the British prime minister's contact with the wizarding world. What's strange with this first chapter is that it is completely unnecessary. Unless Rowling has something planned for the seventh book that requires this initial scene, it is inexplicable why she would want to start the book with it. The book's second chapter is more understandable; it introduces an important plot element which Harry cannot witness--though it could have been possible for Rowling to work this information into the story at a later time. But at least this scene would have made more sense as the book's opening chapter.

Once we get back to Harry's point-of-view, we see the usual course of events unfold: Harry at the Dursley's, the trip to Hogwarts, Harry getting into trouble and missing the Sorting ceremony, the introduction of the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. All of these with the expected new twists and diversions, but the same routine all the same.

Once into the meat of the story, another inconsistency--albeit a consistent one--appears. Dumbledore, as usual, acts completely unwilling to tell Harry what the hell is going on. While Harry himself is more forthcoming in responsibly telling everyone what he thinks they should know, Dumbledore is yet again being frustratingly closed, cutting short Harry's questions, only giving out mysterious snippets of information for little-understood reasons, and then quickly hustling Harry out of the room, when he has so many questions to ask. While this is consistent with Dumbledore's past behavior, it is not consistent with the conclusion of the previous book, when Dumbledore apologizes to Harry for keeping him in the dark, and laments about how foolish he was not to tell Harry what he needed to know. And yet from the start of this book, he's right back at it again, as reticent as ever, for no reason we can figure. A bit annoying, that.

Aside from these nits, however, the book forms up well. We get the usual serving of Rowling's adventure, twists, and revelations, and the usual confrontation at the end, and the denouement afterwards. Of course I won't reveal--above the fold, at least--the nature of the climax, what we learn about Voldemort, or who the half-blood prince is. Suffice to say that none of these could be guessed at, all of them being original beyond any clues in past books.

Still, the book left me unsatisfied, beyond even the inevitable comparisons between this novel and Veil. It just seemed like it could have been much more than it was. The characters acted less than convincingly, and the story seemed to lack meaning. Perhaps this is an artifact of the being the lead-up to the final book; it does leave you wondering, at the end, about how much you've read really happened, and how much is part of some plan that Harry has not been let in on.

Nevertheless, it is an interesting yarn. Worth reading, but it could have been better.

More below the fold...

WARNING

• • • SPOILERS BELOW • • •

All right, you've been warned.

I am assuming that if you are reading this, then you have either finished reading the book, or don't care about reading spoiler details about the storyline. So here goes.

Above, I explained Dumbledore's unexplained secrecy as one example of inconsistent behavior. Another example is Hermione and Ron's. Rowling makes it clear in this novel that the two are destined to pair up (just as Harry and Ginny are, though that's been hardly less a secret). But of course, they can't just fall in love, get together, and be happy. They have to screw things up, and badly. Jealousy, mostly, gets in the way, as Ron and Hermione use for-the-moment lovers to hurt each other, with Hermione getting invited to exclusive parties and getting along too well with Slughorn suck-up Cormac McLaggen, and Ron retaliating by snagging Lavender Brown and making out with her rather outrageously in public. The whole thing goes more than just a little too far; caricature is fine, but you can't have too much of that and take the story very seriously. (Edit: on review of this paragraph, I should have called Ron & Hermione's behavior "outlandish" or "extreme" rather than "inconsistent.")

Hermione also has a few character flaws as well. One is when she remains pissed off at Harry for having made Ron think he'd taken the good-luck potion. Okay, while Hermione believed Harry really had slipped Ron the potion for use in a Quidditch match, her anger was understandable. But why should she still think it's unethical after Harry reveals that he just made Ron feel lucky? Where's the harm in a placebo, especially if Ron doesn't mind? It's just the equivalent of calming Ron's unreasonable nervousness.

But even more uncharacteristic is Hermione's reaction to Harry's use of the half-blood prince's textbook scrawls. Sure, Harry has an unfair advantage here. But he's not doing anything Hermione doesn't do on a regular basis, in that he's getting useful information from someone else's writing. Instead of being peeved at Harry for using the book, Hermione--once she recognizes that the book carried useful information--should have immediately asked Harry if she could read it herself, in order to learn more.

Of course, a big part of my dissatisfaction with how the characters act has to do with my brother's novel. When he wrote Harry Potter and the Veil of Mystery, he picked up where Rowling left off, but without her literary excesses. He wrote the story as if the characters were reasonable people--still flawed, but more understandable and sensible. Dumbledore opens up to Harry, telling him what he needs to know; when he keeps information hidden from Harry (such as the reason Fawkes bonds with him), it makes sense. Hermione and Ron fall into their respective relationships in an understandable way; perhaps too mature for teenagers, but far more realistically than Rowling has them acting. And particularly, there is my brother's handling of Snape, and why he is the way he is; I still don't know what Rowling has planned for Snape, but the idea of the Cleansing is just too good not to want to have it be part of the story. While Rowling's Snape is consistent and, especially at the end, scary, he remains much more an enigma, difficult to understand beyond just being a bad guy.

And while Rowling does an acceptable job of working moral values and cautionary tales into her story, The Veil of Mystery was far richer in its coverage of issues and the exploration of philosophy and major themes of life. This is something that you tend to miss after having gotten used to it.

A few interesting contrasts pop up between my brother's book and Rowling's. For example, in Veil, Harry becomes the Dark Arts teacher, and when he is introduced, Malfoy lets out an astonished shout from the students' tables. In Prince, Snape is given the position and Harry lets out the astonished shout from the students' tables. In both books, Dumbledore dies, but in Veil, the death is with significant meaning; in Prince, if there is meaning to his death, Rowling keeps it well-hidden. Perhaps it is just to isolate Harry and force him to mature and be independent; maybe it was planned so as to allow Snape to infiltrate even deeper into Voldemort's camp; or perhaps there is something about Dumbledore's death, or perhaps he didn't really die--something we'll find out about in book seven. But for now, his death seems unsatisfyingly empty.

One more contrast is the development of Harry and Ginny's relationship. A major theme in my brother's novel was that love could not keep two people apart, even if there is a great deal of risk involved. Despite the dangers inherent in being Harry Potter's girlfriend, Ginny insists on taking on those risks, the price otherwise being too much to pay. This was echoed in the most recent Spiderman film; even though Peter Parker planned to keep away from MJ, in the end, they both decided that the risk was one worth taking.

In The Half-Blood Prince, however, Rowling not only goes in the other direction, but does so with such brevity and lack of concern that it kind of cheapens the relationship. Ginny is unhappy, but simply accepts it and they both move on. It's not exactly a break-up, but it's not example a compelling confirmation of their feelings for each other, either. I like my brother's solution better--it not only conveys stronger feelings and values, but reinforces the concept of love being a strengthening component of magic, and as such, a self-correcting mechanism for proper use of power.

But what The Half-Blood Prince does very well is to keep the reader guessing. Who is this mysterious "R.A.B." who seems intent on pursuing Voldemort? Where are the other Horcruxes and how will Harry find them and then defeat Voldemort? Did Snape really kill Dumbledore, or was it somehow fixed? Will Dumbledore reappear, either alive or in some other form? Will he be a ghost, or perhaps a portrait? Is Snape really a bad guy, or a good guy with a hidden purpose as so many believe?

In the meantime, we can speculate. Some are suggesting that R.A.B. is Regulus Black, which would make sense in that Harry is now well-entangled in the Black family, having inherited Grimmauld Place and Kreacher's service; one could imagine Regulus working into this somehow, affecting Harry from those elements. My sister-in-law quite intriguingly supposed (and it seems that many on the Internet have had the same idea) that Harry himself will turn out to be the final Horcrux, having received a piece of Voldemort's soul upon the death of his mother and the application of the killing curse that gave him the scar--or perhaps the scar itself is the Horcrux. This makes sense, as it would explain how Harry came to possess so many of Voldemort's abilities.

We'll just have to wait another two years to find out....

That Was Fast

The new Harry Potter book arrived today, from Amazon Japan. But then again, it's past midnight Friday in Japan, though not yet in the U.S. And just past midnight in the U.K. Not to mention that many (resellers and libraries) have had the book in their possession for some time now. In any case, I've got a bit of reading material now. It will be very interesting to compare this with my brother's work.

Update: apparently, Amazon Japan mistakenly sent a lot of the copies out a few days early. I got mine delivered within an hour after the worldwide release time, so not early but not really that late, either.

Harry Potter Fan Fiction Trilogy: Phoenix Intuition

And so we come to the third and (I believe) final installment in my brother's Harry Potter book series. His first two installments, Harry Potter and the Veil of Mystery, and Harry Potter and the Ring of Reduction, covered the sixth and seventh years of Harry Potter at Hogwarts, following Rowling's first five books (picking up at the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) and ending Harry's years as a student at Hogwarts. Veil and Ring were written in the same style as Rowling's books, covering one year at Hogwarts, and written in the "third person limited" point of view--that is, the story is told completely as the protagonist views it. Each of these two novels were also long, equivalent to perhaps a 1000- to 1200-page book.

This last novel, Phoenix Intuition, breaks those rules in many ways. First of all, it is not written in the third person limited; it is in the third person omniscient, and often leaves Harry to view other events outside of Harry's experience. Second, Harry is no longer a student and this novel does not restrict itself to the Hogwarts calendar--in fact, it starts several years before the main events in the story. Third, the novel is shorter, about half as long as the previous novels. And fourth, the story not only incorporates real-world events, but is set on a world stage. So if you're looking for a different kind of Harry Potter novel, written by someone whose writing is excellent and tested, then this will be a good read for you.

Since Phoenix Intuition relies somewhat heavily on the previous two novels by my brother, I would strongly suggest reading the other two before picking up this one, otherwise you won't know a lot about what is happening. Also keep in mind that these three fan fiction books assume a branching of events after the end of The Order of the Phoenix; they diverge--sharply, would be a sound guess--from the direction Rowling is taking in her sixth Harry Potter Book, The Half-Blood Prince, due out in less than a week. So if you read The Half-Blood Prince, assume its events take place in a different Harry Potter "universe" or "timeline."

Please find the novel presented here in PDF form, in two versions: U.S. Letter (8.5 x 11) size, for those who wish to print the entire book out on your printers (496 pages), and B5 (roughly 7 x 10 inches) size, for easier reading on a computer screen. A text-only version for those who will read on their iPod, PDA or other plain text reader will be released soon; look to this post or the main Harry Potter Fanfic entry.

Enjoy.

TV Guide, Japan

About 8 months ago, I switched from cable to satellite TV here in Japan. When I was on cable TV, there was a program guide mailed to me every month; however, with satellite TV, there's no guide. Yes, there's a live "what's on" channel that you can go forward for one week, and they even have an English version for it--but it's clunky at best.

So for six months, I subscribed to an English TV Guide magazine, which gave all-English listings for cable and satellite channels (not the terrestrial Japanese-language channels). That was good, but it was also expensive--¥800 ($7.20) an issue, with no price break at all for 6- or 12-month subscriptions. At almost ten thousand yen per year, that's a pretty pricey TV guide--especially if you only use it for half a dozen channels or so.

I was about to re-subscribe, however painfully, when I figured I'd give it a pass for at least one month. During that time, I found out something that made me feel a bit foolish: you don't need to pay for it. Each channel publishes its full schedule on their web site, and most--even though they're Japanese companies in Japan--publish an alternate schedule in English. Each one is presented as a PDF file, and these files are sometimes almost identical to what I'd been paying so much for. All you have to do is visit the sites for the channels you watch each month and print out the PDF file: instant TV guide in English, for only a few pennies. Like I said, I felt like a fool for dishing out that much.

Strangely--or not so strangely, considering--the Fox channel (entertainment, not news) is the only one I watch that does not publish and English-language schedule. Which kind of figures; Fox is also one of two, maybe three channels on all of satellite TV (another is the Disney channel) which does broadcasts bilingual (Japanese and English) in a non-standard format that defies the usual technology for extra audio channels. With other channels, like Super-Channel or AXN, you can set the channel to bilingual mode and it will always be in English from then on. But with Fox, you have to switch from Japanese to English every time you change the channel. Furthermore, it's not easy to switch; at least on my set, you have to activate the menu, move up one level, across one, and then down to, and then set--pushing five different buttons six times just to change the audio. But worst, the audio cannot be controlled from my DVR--meaning that I have to manually switch audio for every programmed show recorded off of Fox. A huge pain in the neck.

All whining aside, here are the pages where you can download English versions of monthly programming schedules:

AXN
Super Channel
LaLa (a cumbersome PDF, takes a while to display)
Movie Plus
Cinefil Imagica (click "Schedule" on the left)
Fox (Japanese only)

Revenge of the Sith

An interesting fold-out photo from Vanity Fair. Click on the image to see a larger version.

So today I saw the film, and felt like giving a review of it. I'll make a general, non-spoiler review here, above the fold, and give a more lengthy, spoiler-laden commentary hidden under a link at the bottom of this entry (as seen on the main page).

In short, it is a lot like I expected--a special effects festival with mythological themes and the trademark corny dialog so much in Lucas' style. There is a bigger story underlaying the usual Star Wars flash, the transformation of Anakin to the dark side, a dimension in excess of the past Star Wars films. And then there's the stitching-together of the trilogies, with Lucas working to make the end of this film match with the beginning of the original film.

As a Star Wars film in the usual sense, the SFX & mythology, this film was brilliant. The visuals are both extraordinary and at the same time hardly worth noting because that's what you'd expect from a Star Wars film, and no less. Special visual effects fill the movie, wall-to-wall, and it's a treat for the eyes, from the beautiful to the gruesome. As for the mythology, much is made of that in this film; talk about the light and dark sides of the force, the nature of life and death, the corruption of jealousy and greed, of selfishness and selflessness. Even so, several answers that I expected to see answered in this film about the Star Wars universe were not--and even a few new questions were introduced. But if you like the speculation and the ability to play with the universe with your imagination, there's nothing wrong with that.

In the sense of this film being about a man's descent into darkness, Anakin's transformation into the dark Lord Darth Vader, the film does well to begin and end the process, but falters at the key juncture right in the middle. All the elements, all the reasons are there for Anakin to make the leap--but this is not the kind of story that Lucas is adept at telling, and he falters here. Still, if you can get past that one critical point, perhaps filling in the blanks yourself, then the rest is very well executed.

And then as far as the film is intended to bring us up to the beginning of the original Star Wars film, everything is brought together very well. In fact, it may be brought together a little too well, as there are so many elements that had to be stitched together. It's hard to be surprised by this film, because you already know exactly what's going to happen. Still, many of these events are like a familiar echo, a nostalgia reaching back to the first time you went to see the Star Wars films, and are entertaining in that respect alone. When Padme names the twins, when you first see the Darth Vader helmet put on, when you see Obi-wan pick up Anakin's light saber, knowing it will go to Luke--all of these are elements you expect and have been waiting for, and they work. But too much of the rest seems almost too intentionally laid out, like Yoda dictating where the children will go and how they'll be raised--like Lucas needs to telegraph all the points, forcing them into their rightful places instead of being able to let the audience assume that things will happen naturally, as the logical thing to do. Again, if you're able to set that aside, it's great fun to watch it all come into place, even if some of the pieces are a bit forced.

So as a Star Wars film, it's great; but as a drama with a believable storyline, it's very good, but could have been better.

More below the fold...

*** *** WARNING -- SPOILERS BELOW *** ***

There are a lot of treats in this film, in terms of visuals and the story, many of them harkening back to the original trilogy. You can see the evolution of the ships, uniforms and machines so they closely match the first movies. You can see, for example, the hangar bay of a star destroyer with the exact same grapple arms in it as the star destroyer in the original Star Wars. We get introduced to the rebel blockade runner, the ship Princess Leia is chased down in from the first film, complete with the high-contrast white hallways we saw Darth Vader stride down before. We even get to see the Millennium Falcon, briefly and small, in the corner of the screen as Anakin, Obi-wan and the Chancellor return to the city after crashing down in the broken starship at the conclusion of the initial action sequence.

The other connections to other films in the series are numerous. We see the TIE fighter develop from the Jedi fighter; the Emperor's throne room from Return of the Jedi is re-created as Palpatine's prison on Grievous' ship; we see several mouse 'droids flee before Anakin, just like the ones from the Death Star; the usual assortment of oft-repeated Star Wars lines; and we even see Leia's cinnamon-bun hairstyle on Padme. We meet Chewbacca (which makes sense, as he was always referred to as a 200-year-old Wookie), and Bail Organa of "Princess Leia Organa" fame. We hear Yoda introduce Obi-wan to the paradigm of Vader "killing" Anakin, and hear Palpatine turn the Republic into the Empire with a single sentence. And seeing Vader and the Emperor on that familiar (hell, identical) star destroyer bridge as they witness the beginning of construction on the Death Star... and that double-sunset on Tatooine was perfectly done.

There are other Easter Eggs as well. Watch the hallway in the visual-opera hall (or whatever it is) just before Anakin walks in to see Palpatine. On the left you'll see a blue-skinned alien. That's George Lucas, in his only on-screen cameo. There's the "Wilhelm" scream that has been slipped into every Star Wars film, and most action films in general. And did you happen to see Grand Moff Tarkin at the end? These and other Easter Eggs are outlined here.

A few stitches seem forced or arbitrary, however. Palpatine's face transforms physically into the puffy/wrinkly-faced mask we see in the original films, almost instantaneously when his own dark-side-of-the-force lighting bolts are forced back upon him. Why didn't Luke's face undergo the same transformation in Return of the Jedi when he was subjected to a similar, or even more powerful dose? Some suggest that the effect is to reveal the person's true self, but that sounds a little too apologetic. Maybe if you assume that Sidious is able to shape-shift, and his human face reverted to his Sith face when weakened by the attack--but nothing was said to make us believe this. Another continuity stitch was thrown in almost as an afterthought when Organa orders C-3PO's memory wiped, for no apparent reason. It had to happen so as to explain Threepio's ignorance of matters in the original trilogy, but all the same, it's thrown in like a punch line without a joke to support it.

There are also some sequences which are pretty damned cool in and of themselves. The fight sequence between Obi-wan and General Grievous, with Grievous wielding four light-sabers with mechanical speed. The fight between Yoda and the Emperor. The tragic slaying of the Jedi, with Williams' score delivering the emotional impact. The entire sequence on the lava world between Anakin, Padme and Obi-wan. And I'd imagine few fans could fail to find extremely cool Yoda's move of throwing his light saber at the storm trooper, then climbing up his falling torso to retrieve it.

One action sequence did not live up to expectations, however: the fight between Mace Windu and Palpatine. I expected it to take a lot longer than it did. First, Palpatine does away with the three other Jedi masters who accompany Windu a bit too quickly and easily. Maybe this makes him seem a bit more scary, but I think the scariness could have been enhanced by some more wicked one-against-four fighting scenes (though Lucas has never been quite as good at portraying such scenes--as is often the case with similar scenes in Samurai films, too often it seems like the guys on the outnumbering side are holding back, each one waiting their turn). Certainly Palpatine's initial acrobatic leap-and-hideous-roar set the tone well. But then we see too little of the fight between Windu and Palpatine before it ends. Even more disappointing is Windu's death, by Palpatine's lightning bolts. I fully expected Anakin and Windu to have their own duel a la Luke and Vader; I think this would have enhanced the feeling of Anakin making an irrevocable turn. Instead, he makes one split-second decision to stop Windu, and it's even based on Jedi principles. That makes him seem less committed to turning to the dark side right away; a long fight with Windu, with dialog between him and Windu with Palpatine manipulating him from the sidelines would have been much more appropriate for this critical scene.

That leads me to my biggest problem with the storytelling, namely Anakin deciding to side with the Emperor. You just don't get the impact that you should, to believe that it's time for Anakin to make the decision. Yes, you see Anakin and Padme looking at each other across the city, and you get the fact that he doesn't want her to die, and he sees Palpatine as his only hope for that. But the impact isn't there. You just don't feel it. It's too sudden, from Anakin being the nice guy, humble before Obi-wan and dutiful to Mace Windu, and then suddenly he's willing to go off and slaughter children and wipe out the Jedi order. He doesn't appear to go through nearly enough agony to be consistent with how Lucas has drawn his character. Which is why I think the protracted light saber battle between him and Windu would have helped; it could have showcased his angst, and made his investment in stepping over the line to Sidious' side far more believable.

Moreover, why did Anakin continue to trust Sidious even after he discovered he was a Sith lord? Anakin only had Sidious' word that there was a way to keep people from dying by using the dark side. I know he was desperate to find some way to keep Padme alive, but shouldn't he have at least considered the possibility that he was being fooled? And after he learned of Padme's death, why didn't he turn on Sidious then? After all, he must have realized that Padme died as a result of his turning to the dark side, and Sidious was responsible for that.

Some other things in the film do not make sense, like Anakin getting pissed off that he's not been made a Jedi Master after being appointed to the council by Palpatine. One would naturally expect the title of Jedi Master to be assigned through a long series of difficult accomplishments, not to mention a heightened state of self-control and wisdom--not through a purely political appointment. It's as if Lucas felt he had to set Anakin off against the Jedi, and this was the best he could come up with. One of the other points in the film that makes it a bit clunky is how Chancellor Palpatine/Darth Sidious/The Emperor manipulates the situation. He does it in a somewhat ham-handed way, buttering up Anakin, and playing his role over the top otherwise, with the Jedi constantly "sensing" something wrong but not quite figuring it out; you kind of get a bit tired of this.

But the biggest disconnect for me was when Obi-wan left Anakin to die. Yes, it had to happen that way in order for continuity to work. But if he cared about Anakin as much as he claimed--and didn't know Sidious was on his way to save Anakin--then it was intolerably cruel for Obi-wan to just leave Anakin sitting on the bank of lava, on fire, legs and arm cut off, to slowly die in agony. Sure, Obi-wan didn't want to kill Anakin. But leaving him there to suffer was gutless.

And then there's the politics, inserted as subtly as any of the other dialog: not very. Anakin's Bush-like "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy," answered by Obi-wan's "Only a Sith deals in absolutes." Oooo. Darth Dubya! Much less clunky, but still sticking out, was Padme's commentary on the transition to Empire: "So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause." Just as fitting, but more compellingly introduced commentary on present-day social issues.

And finally, the mythology of Star Wars. We were supposed to hear an explanation of why Obi-wan simply vanished (later followed by Yoda) when Vader cut him down in the first film. Okay, Yoda tells Obi-wan that Qui-gon Jinn has found a way back from "the nether-world of the Force," and we know how Obi-wan spends those years on Tatooine, communing with Qui-gon and learning how to survive after death. But not only is that a quick, off-camera cheat, it doesn't tell us why Obi-wan and Yoda disappeared when they died--or why Vader didn't, even though he also survived after death as a Jedi ghost--even without communing and training to do so. And would it have been so impossible to get Liam Neeson to do a cameo? That would have been much cooler, for him to actually appear and explain a thing or two.

Still, we are introduced, not to an answer, but to possible speculation on why and how Anakin was born in the first place. We learned in The Phantom Menace that Anakin had no father, and was conceived by the Midi-chlorians. Here, Lucas introduces the story of the Sith lord Darth Plagueis the Wise, who we learn was Sidious' master. Palpatine claims that Plagueis learned how to use the Force to influence the midi-chlorians to create life (as he rather meaningfully looked over at Anakin). He also claimed that Plagueis' apprentice, in fact Palpatine/Sidious, learned "everything he knew," suggesting that Sidious also could create life and keep people from dying. Which both answers and opens up the question, how was Anakin conceived?

Lucas coyly keeps the answer open to interpretation, saying that he prefers to let fans come to their own conclusions. So did Plagueis or Sidious use the Force to conceive Anakin, and why? Others point to this power when you see Sidious touch Anakin's head after Sidious finds Anakin near death; but it is too similar to Obi-wan touching Padme's head in the same way: a Force trick to put someone to sleep, which we saw Qui-gon do to Jar-jar. But the whole angle of Anakin's conception will leave fans to imagine what they will--and may well open up the book and comic series to new story possibilities. Not to mention what Lucas himself has announced as a possible live-action Star Wars series, which could answer a lot of these questions, especially if the series is set either during or before the Clone Wars.

So in review, I seem to have had quite a few things to say. You may have noticed a lot of it is critical. However, that doesn't mean I disapprove of, or did not greatly enjoy the film. I did. It's a great film. I'll be seeing it again in a few weeks with my brother, and will certainly get the DVD, which Lucas has hinted will be ready by Christmas.

Not a Donut

On June 8, 1977, my 13th birthday, my father announced that the whole family was going out to get donuts. This is something we did from time to time, going to the closest Winchell's Donut shop (they had great donuts, but have long since disappeared). After we'd been driving for a while, I noticed we weren't going to the usual shop, and my father said there was a much better store in San Jose. I wasn't too fast to pick up on the fact that he was spoofing me; in fact, when we came in sight of the Century theaters, I exclaimed that that was where "Star Wars" was playing, and it wasn't until we turned into the parking lot of the theater that I figured out what my birthday present was.

I was one of those kids who was dying to see the movie. At that time, exactly two weeks after its release, it was still only playing in very few theaters, such as the Century in San Jose and the Coronet in San Francisco. Naturally, I was ecstatic to find out I'd be seeing it that day.

After the film ended, we were walking out to the parking lot when my mother, who'd left the group, caught up with us and gave me something: the button you see pictured here. She had seen one of the theater ushers wearing it, and had asked if she could buy one. When the usher said they weren't for sale, my mother started to tell the story about how much her son loved that movie and would die to have a button like that, as only mothers can do. Defenseless, the usher gave up his own button, which my mother then presented to me.

Okay, call me geeky, call me a nerd (I fully expect someone to do that in the comments), but I still have the button and I'm going to quietly wear it tomorrow when I go see Revenge of the Sith. (Which is the first day it is showing in Japan, in a delayed release here.) I've actually never worn it before, not to any subsequent Star Wars movie screenings (though I probably did wear it to school a couple of times 28 years ago). But this being the last film, I figure, why not? (Actually, a search on Google showed several people with the identical pin had the same idea already. So I can't be the geekiest, so what?)

And just in case you were wondering, no, it's not really that valuable as a collectible. Someone on EBay is selling a similar one for $6, though this guy is asking $20 for the one identical to mine. Not that I'd ever part with it--its sentimental value is way too high.

Downloading Dent?

Just a week after its release, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith is expected to break $200 million--and that's just the domestic box office. Overseas, it's earned over $160 million by now. And none of that includes the merchandising, or the DVD sales that often match or exceed box office sales. It is probably safe to say that by the end of the year, the film will gross well over a billion dollars.

A bootleg copy of the film--a workprint straight from LucasFilm, in fact--has been available on BitTorrent since just before the film was released, and probably tens of thousands of people have downloaded it. Federal agents stormed sites in ten cities across eight states as the MPAA got help from the FBI and--why, I have no idea: the Department of Homeland Security--in shutting down "Elite Torrents," a BitTorrent tracking web site which guides people to make the connections to download movies such as Sith.

But it doesn't stop there. A 60-year-old man was arrested in California for taking digital still photos of the screen while Sith was playing. Still photos. Of lesser quality than hundreds of photos which have been out there legally for months now. He faces a $2500 fine. The theater owner explained it like this:

But Del Oro Theatre co-owner Mike Getz said Keachie's actions Thursday amount to movie piracy. Signs near the entrance to the theater clearly state that video recording devices are prohibited, he said.

"People who are (pirating films) are costing us billions of dollars a year," Getz said of the cinema industry.

Now, the Torrents site I can understand, but the guy with the still camera? Please. Throw him out of the theater and be done with it. But arrest him and claim he's responsible for "billions" of dollars lost?

The MPAA and related industries, in a way similar to the RIAA, are acting like Republicans nowadays--highly successful and hurt none at all by the opposition, but playing the grievously wounded victim for the cameras, as if they were getting killed by this nickel-and-dime stuff.

Say 100,000 people download the Star Wars movie. You think that even a sizable minority won't go see the film in theaters? Unlikely. Most of these are people who'll still go see the film three times, then buy the DVD along with bags of merchandise from the film. I don't care how much it's downloaded, Star Wars isn't going to lose a dime from Torrents, and certainly not a penny from senior citizens with digital cameras. There will not be a single dent in George Lucas' wallet.

The truth is, illegal downloading, despite being illegal, isn't doing the music or movie industry any actual harm--but it might if they keep acting like fascists. I mean, Homeland Security? Shouldn't they be hunting down terrorists instead of arresting people for stealing a few bucks apiece from billionaires? Do they not have their priorities straight? Lighten up, people.

One way to lighten up: watch this. I love ChewBroccoli.

Harry Potter and the Ring of Reduction: Whole Book Files

Okay, for those of you who have been patiently waiting for Ring of Reduction fanfiction novel to be released in whole-book form, here it is, in two different versions--one PDF and one text-only. The downloadable PDF file has 12-point Garamond text at 1.5x line spacing. I intended to have two different PDF versions, one B5 and one US Letter, but repeated attempts at the US Letter sized files failed for some reason. I'll have to come back to that in a day or two and try from scratch again.

So instead, I just have the B5-sized PDF version. B5 is an international paper size a bit smaller than US Letter. If you prefer larger lettering, you can use this to print out an enlarged version on US Letter size, probably scaled at 115% of normal size. In this format, the book is 1255 pages long, not including the Table of Contents, and weighs in at 4.6 MB. This format is better for viewing on a computer screen, should you prefer to read it that way.

Also, there is the plain text version, which weighs in at 2.4 MB.

The main Harry Potter page will be updated in the next day or so.

Harry Potter and the Ring of Reduction: Remaining Chapters

As a testament to how a book can grab your attention and make it hard to put down, I pretty much mowed through the remaining chapters of Ring of Reduction in a matter of a few days. which is saying something when you're trying to do proofreading and editing while working at your full-time job. So here are the remaining chapters of Ring of Reduction. The "whole book" and text-format files will probably follow this tomorrow or the next day (could be later, I have to construct a table of contents and perhaps churn out two differently-formatted files).

More Harry Potter Fan Fiction: Ring of Reduction, Chapters 4-9

Okay, I've finished editing chapters 4-9 of Ring of Reduction. Things are going faster than I thought, and with luck, I'll be finished with the whole text in a week or so. In the meantime, enjoy more adventures of Harry Potter!

These two set weigh in a bit more than the last one, at 580 KB and 680 KB, respectively. A few stats for the record: so far, 113 people have downloaded the entire-book file for The Veil of Mystery since it was made available about four weeks ago, 24 have downloaded the entire book by chapter segments, and another 18 have downloaded the text file, for 155 total downloads. And since three days ago, 22 have downloaded the first three chapters of Ring of Reduction. Several dozen visitors have come in from search engines looking for Harry Potter fan fiction... though some of the search terms suggest that not all of them are looking for, um, this kind of story.

Revenge of the Sith Japan

As I posted before, the final Star Wars movie is being released worldwide May 18-20th, with the sole exception of Japan, which will see it open on July 9th (with no good reason that I can see for the delay). But there is at least one thing that will make it a bit less late, if you really want to see it: advance screenings. Japanese theaters will often give advance showings one and two weeks before a film gets released. Warner/MyCal, an American-style theater chain in Japan, will have screenings on June 25 and July 2, tickets for which will go on sale on June 16. Toho Cinemas (formerly Virgin Cinemas, and so another western-style chain) will be having screenings the same day, though they haven't decided when ticket sales will begin. The advance screenings will likely begin in the morning and go past midnight each day.

I frequent those two chains because of the theater styles. If you've been to movie theaters in Japan, you will know what I'm talking about, the concessions in particular. Stale popcorn with minimal salt and no butter, and otherwise a limited selection of supermarket-type snacks, some very odd to the westerner. Drinks often are sold from vending machines in tiny cups. The western-style chains have the full fresh buttered-popcorn, large drink, and more appealing snack routine--interestingly at prices that can often be less than at U.S. chains (though the high ticket prices in Japan make up for that). They also have designated seating--when you buy your ticket, you can see exactly what seats are available and choose where you'll sit--though if you buy e-tickets, they make you choose blindly by section (dividing the theater into only a few large sections, meaning you could be seated way up front or far in back), a weird idea, making it less convenient to buy online (unless you don't care where you sit too much).

Ticket prices are a standard ¥1800 for adults (almost $17), with advance tickets going for ¥1300 ($12) or ¥1500 ($14). Though they don't have matinees in the morning or afternoon, they do have late shows (after 9pm usually) for ¥1200 ($11), and "First Day" specials on the first of every month for ¥1000 (just over $9). Wednesdays are usually "Ladies' Days" with women getting in for ¥1000.

Sometimes theaters in Japan sell memorabilia for big movies, including movie program booklets, large-size glossy photo books introducing the movie, its characters, cast credits and other stuff like that.

Harry Potter and the Ring of Reduction (Fan Fiction)

As promised, I've been formatting my brother's second Harry Potter fanfic novel (year seven), Harry Potter and the Ring of Reduction, sequel to Harry Potter and the Veil of Mystery. When I did the same for Veil, I responded to requests and released the entire book before I was finished formatting and editing out typos, and as a result, the original PDF file was far from presentable (unless you're not bothered by typos and bad formatting). So this time, I'm not releasing the whole book at once. Instead, I'll be releasing it in eight three-chapter segments, and then when that's finished, I'll post the entire book as one file. Since school has started again, it won't be blazingly fast, but I'll do the best I can. If you don't like waiting between chapter segments, then you might want to hold back and wait for the whole thing to come out at once.

I'll be introducing new three-chapter segments in individual posts, but they will also be added to the main Harry Potter post linked to in the sidebar at right (which you'll notice is now changed to add Ring of Reduction). So you can bookmark that page if you want to see all the file links at once.

Without further ado, here are chapters 1-3 of Harry Potter and the Ring of Reduction:

So Where's the Japanese iTunes Music Store?

Sure, I can still buy songs via the U.S. store because I still have my U.S.-based credit card with the billing sent to my folks' house back home. And for me, that'll do fine, because the Japanese store will likely be more expensive. Nevertheless, a lot of people here (such as my students, who would love such a chance to buy their music that way) don't have that resource, and so would depend on a Japan-based resource. Right now, there aren't many good alternatives; Sony Music Direct charges $2 per song or more. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported that Apple plans to launch the Japan iTunes store "this spring," but there's no sign of it happening soon. The expected date was March, but that's come and gone. More recently, the Mainichi Shimbun reported that Apple is "poised" to enter talks with music companies here, and may have the store online by the end of the year.

Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway just got theirs, added to Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Japan is the second biggest music market in the world after the U.S., but it is still stuck way back in the 80's in that it is high-priced and more than a bit protectionist. Apple is being shut out while ten domestic online services sell music here, up to $3 per song. Music CDs still cost an arm and a leg here, and reports are that to sell CDs here for the ridiculous price of $30 a pop, special tracks withheld in the U.S. and elsewhere are added here to make the local versions more attractive. Bands are asked to record these tracks just for the Japanese market, which helps to discourage cheaper imports--so I hear.

When the iTunes Music Store finally does break through, it will likely not be for the 99 cents we pay in the U.S. But the question is, how much will it be, and when will it be allowed in? You know Apple has to be chomping at the bit to open up the online store here (any claims of "they aren't trying" will fall flat), and in addition to their reputation in the U.S., Apple has a killer interface with iTunes and a popular delivery system with the iPod--which may be why they're being locked out. Despite lagging sales, Japanese music labels don't want to surrender the astronomical prices, and complain that Apple's digital rights management (DRM) is insufficient--Japanese online stores all have heavy copy protection that does not allow burning onto a CD at all.

In the meantime, I'll just recommend to my students that they get a U.S. credit card and find a friend there whose address they can use for billing, until they finish up school here and move to the U.S.

Harry Potter Fan Fiction: The Veil of Mystery, The Ring of Reduction, and Phoenix Intuition

I am rewriting this post because all three books are now done. Let me introduce the situation. My brother has begun writing fan fiction, and he's done so with a vengeance. He prefers not to be identified by name on the web, and goes by the handle "Semprini," a Monty Python in-joke.

So far he has written three novels based on the Harry Potter series. The books pick up where Rowling's fifth book (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) left off. They diverge from the original novels there, so you will note quite a few contradictions between them and Rowling's sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Essentially, my brother's books finish the Rowling series and then some: The Veil of Mystery is book six, The Ring of Reduction is book seven--the end of Harry's time at Hogwarts--and Phoenix Intuition takes place a few years after Harry graduates. So if you begin reading The Veil of Mystery, it is advised that you re-read Rowling's The Order of the Phoenix so as to remind yourself where things stand.

All three of my brother's books were completed before Rowling released The Half-Blood Prince. My brother may or may not write another Harry Potter book in the future, but if he does, it will likely be quite different from the novels he has written, and may be in a very different time and setting.

The books tend to be long. Both Veil and Ring would be more than 1000 pages each if published in hardcover form. We're talking more than 400,000 words each. Phoenix Intuation is about half that length.

You might also be surprised at the quality: they are extremely well-written. I'm not just saying that because it's my brother, I mean it. Many readers have even said they prefer my brother's book six to Rowling's version--and frankly, I agree. A matter of personal preference, of course--both authors take the series in different directions, which will suit different people in different ways. But to be compared favorably to Rowling is no small feat.

It should also be said that the novels are written for an older audience. There is an strong tendency to weave in elements of morality (without getting even near "preachy"), current events, and observations of interpersonal relationships. In contrast to Rowling's books where characters act in ways that are forced by drama or mystery, my brother's rendition of the characters is more in line with real life, the way responsible and rational people act--and yet he maintains drama and mystery.

The books are presented here chiefly as PDF files, readable on any computer. For a Mac, just use TextEdit. For Windows, use Abode Reader or any other application with PDF ability. The books are presented in B5 paper size (roughly 7" x 10") to be more readble on a computer monitor; if you print out on US Letter-sized paper, there will either be very large margins, or the typeface will appear a bit large. The third book has a US Letter version; in the future I may translate the first two books to this format also. The first two books also come divided into sets of three chapters, and have plain-text formats as well.

All of the below files are in PDF format. Chapter group files range from 360 KB to 880 KB in size; the whole book file is 4.2 MB.

Download Plain Text version (2.2 MB)

And...

The files below are in PDF format.

Download Plain Text version (2.2 MB)

And finally...



This completes the trilogy. Again, keep in mind that these three fan fiction books assume a branching of events after the end of The Order of the Phoenix; they diverge--sharply, would be a sound guess--from the direction Rowling is taking in her sixth Harry Potter Book, The Half-Blood Prince, due out in less than a week. So if you read The Half-Blood Prince, assume its events take place in a different Harry Potter "universe" or "timeline."

If you read them, please let me know your thoughts and feelings so I can pass them on to my brother.

By the way, is the B5 size working out? Would anyone prefer US Letter or A4 size for printing, or does everyone read it on the computer?

Air America Radio, Ratings, and the Explosion of "Progressive Talk"

It's been just more than a year since Air America Radio went on the air. It started with 6 stations and jumped to 11 in a few weeks, and now is broadcasting on 52 stations nationwide. It just signed an exclusive multi-year contract with XM Satellite Radio, which has a listening audience of 3.8 million. According to Arbitron, AAR corrals in excess of 2 million listeners a week. Jerry Springer (switching from circus acts to political issues) has also recently signed on as a new host; whether you see that as good or bad, it will definitely bring in more listeners. And stations who switch to AAR programming find themselves shooting from the bottom of the heap to the top of the list in many markets.

Clear Channel radio is bringing in Air America to pick up listeners to its underperforming stations; in Portland, OR station, AAR brought the Clear Channel station from 26th to 3rd in the ratings. Clear Channel is adding 25 stations to the Air America network, because progressive radio "is the fastest growing format in the country; and that is because Air America has proved it attracts listeners and advertisers," according to TIME magazine. That's not just a single opinion, by the way; a web search shows that it is the prevailing opinion: "The future expansion and viability of AM radio is being driven by liberal talk and it is flourishing." And: "liberal talk is the radio industry’s fastest-growing format." And:

Progressive Talk helped drive the News/Talk format to an all-time audience high and a bigger quarterly gain than any other radio format.... The record increase in News/Talk listenership is being driven by the explosive growth of Progressive Talk nationwide. These studies are only the latest evidence of an unmistakable trend towards this new format. ... In the coming year this format will grow ever larger, as more stations recognize the huge number of Americans longing for this format.

And many more, go look for yourself. When Air America was in its first months on the air, conservatives were certain of its doom. Right-wing visitors to this blog made comments such as, "so much for the whiney liberal network," and "Arbitron shows that AA's ratings are in the toilet where they belong. No doubt soon they will be silenced by commercial force majeure." When AAR hit some financial troubles in the beginning, conservatives were gleefully predicting its imminent demise, despite ratings reports that showed AAR was scoring well in key demographics; they instead pointed to variations of the ratings numbers which masked this success.

Air America can now be heard in most of the top 20 markets, and its base is growing fast. I can still hear the conservatives trying to dismiss it: "it's not as big as Limbaugh!" All puns aside, Limbaugh took five years after his start to get an even halfway respectable audience. For a radio network that has been on the air for just over a single year, AAR is performing spectacularly, and may eventually do for the Democrats what Limbaugh and the conservative radio phenomenon did for Republicans.

Harry Potter and the Veil of Mystery

Want to read the next Harry Potter book, now?

On July 16th, about three months from now, the sixth installment of the Harry Potter series is due to hit the bookshelves. It will entail the happenings of Harry Potter's sixth year at Hogwarts, and is eagerly expected by its fans.

Too eagerly, in one case.

My brother decided that waiting wasn't good enough, so about a year and a half ago, he started writing his own version of the sixth book in the series. When I learned of it, I was surprised--I hadn't known that he could write fiction. When I read it, I was even more surprised--it was very well-written.

Now, there are a lot of people out there who write fan fiction (there are even Harry Potter web sites which feature this kind of fiction), but most of what is written is not of very high quality--plot, dialog, and prose can be downright amateurish in most cases--and most of them are in short-story form. Well, not this particular work. Not only is the writing of good quality, but the book is about a thousand pages long, longer than Rowling's own work. It does not ramble, however--it follows a very specific and intentional storyline, picking up exactly where Rowling left off at the end of book five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

The book has a very well-defined plot, carrying on a logical track stemming from the foundation of Rowling's five books. There's a lot of fun, as well as some serious introspection, and a good amount of philosophical thought on morality, relationships, life, and death, without being preachy about it. the book is not written for children, but for a more adult audience while still keeping true to the spirit of the Harry Potter stories.

And my brother didn't stop at just one book--the seventh novel is also complete (or nearly so), finishing up the seven-year storyline, and again weighs in at about a thousand pages. Needless to say, he went on quite a writing binge over the course of the year or so it took to complete both books. He plans to write another Harry Potter book later on, picking up the story in Harry's adult life.

You should know that if you have not read books one through five, this may be confusing as there is a lot of background to the story. But then, if you haven't read the whole series, then you may not be interested in reading this anyway.

I have converted the chapters into PDF form, so if you have a Mac, you can open it with Preview (I recommend viewing in full-screen mode), or on a Windows machine, you can open it with Adobe Reader, which can also install a browser plug-in that allows direct reading in the browser.

I will be presenting the book in chapters, the first one today, and eventually, the whole book in one gigantic file. The first three chapters ("An Owl Gathering," "A Summer's Day at Hogwarts," and "The Wizard and the Boxer") weigh in at 415 KB for 96 pages. The format is B5-sized paper with 3/4-inch margins to accommodate easier reading on computer monitors; the text is in 12-point Garamond, 1.5-spaced, with chapter titles in the Harry Potter "Lumos" font. Soon I will create a special web page for the book and chapter downloads with a link to it in the right-hand column of this blog.

Any comments, feedback, opinions or suggestions are welcome. Here it is:

post edited 4/12/05

Lost Item

Okay, one more addendum to the prior writing on this year's television: Lost. My brother pointed it out to me, and so I figured, why not give it a try. I've seen four episodes, and I have to say, I'm hooked. The story is about forty-eight people (thirteen, maybe fourteen are main characters in an ensemble cast) who survive a crash landing on an island in the South Pacific when their flight from Australia to the U.S. loses communications, runs off course and then hits turbulence which tears the plane into three pieces. the main fuselage lands on the beach of a largish, apparently uninhabited island--one which harbors some pretty strange mysteries.

One would think that the show could not last longer than a season, but apparently they are set up to do just that. The first season is set to cover the first 40 days of the survivors on the island, each episode covering about two days. So far, each episode has been from a certain character's POV, complete with flashbacks to both what they were doing on the plane just before the crash, as well as their lives weeks and months before the crash.

Reportedly, the pilot episode cost $10 million--the highest price for a pilot yet--and was filmed in Hawaii. Michael Keaton was offered the lead role, at least for the pilot (when his character was supposed to get killed), but he passed, and Matthew Fox took the lead--and recurring--role.

Some Very Good Television

The most recent episode of The West Wing was one of the better episodes of the season. Although Sorkin and his magic pen have now long left, the show continues to be of very high quality, an entertaining cross between personal drama and a stimulating civics lesson. This week featured B-stories about border skirmish and ridiculous yet believable yahoos-bringing-us-to-the-brink-of-war between the United States and Canada, as well as a group of youth suffragettes gaining Toby's respect. But the A-story featured an event based on reality: the House Republicans, during an election campaign, shut down a floor vote on stem-cell research when campaigning Democrats come to town to cast their votes, only to deny them that right and reschedule the vote after the Dems have left town. This is based upon what Senate Republicans did last year when Kerry came to D.C. in order to cast his vote for a veteran's health care bill in June of last year: they cancelled the vote. The only difference was that the real Republicans shut down Congress purely to spite Kerry (after having bitterly complained that Kerry didn't vote enough); in the West Wing episode, they do it because they don't have enough votes.

The episode was remarkable not just for its look at issues, but also because it demonstrated that the same old spark is still going with the show; this week you could see the old fire burning, even if it didn't have the full benefit or Sorkin's banter.

But it was not the only show that showed its old energy resurging--The Simpsons put on a grand performance as well. Though recent episodes, as well as many in the past few seasons, have shown a certain tiring, this week's comic farce was back on at full force. Again, Homer seems not to have a job at the power plant unless it comes in handy for a plot, as he takes over for his injured father as a greeter for Sprawl*Mart (motto: "Not a Parody of Wal*Mart," alternately, "if you worked here, you'd be poor by now"); again, Bart does some terrible stuff to Lisa, who overreacts to it (getting a restraining order, forcing Bart to sleep with the local wildlife) and Gary Busey guest stars as the narrator in an educational "Guide to..." video on dealing with restraining orders ("... all of whom couldn't deal with me because I'm too real"). There were some misses in the episode, but far more hits, and a lot of great lines.

So if you thought that either or both of those shows were not up to their old standards, you should start watching again. Not that there aren't other things worth looking at. For example, I never thought I'd say it, but Battlestar Galactica is a pretty good show. Not the old one, of course, that sucked big-time; rather, the new series with Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell. They've finished their 12-episode first season after the four-hour mini-series from 2003, all on the Sci-Fi Channel. The show has very good production quality, good writing, and good acting (you could wonder at how the Sci-Fi Channel got its two rather luminary stars to sign on to what once was a B-quality Star-Wars knock-off). It's also the second-highest-rated cable TV show, after USA's Monk (also a good show, though I've only seen a few episodes; it's very funny, but I'm told that the gags tend to tire upon repeated viewing).

Other Sci-Fi fare include the now-cancelled Enterprise on UPN (just when the show has started to hit its stride), Stargate SG-1 (now finishing its 8th season, moving on to the 9th but with star Richard Dean Anderson bowing out) and its new spin-off, Stargate Atlantis (a show with promise, so long as it doesn't spin off into absurdity).

A fan of the original CSI, I've started watching its spin-offs as well, based in Miami and New York (wait for more cities to join--maybe we'll get a Law and Order-style spin-off-for-every-day-of-the-week schedule). And some said that Star Trek was going too far with just two concurrent spin-off series! The new CSI's do fairly well, with fair casts, but let's admit it: it's the combination of the gore and the cops-and-robbers bad-guy-gets-it-in-the-end classic kitsch that keeps it going.

Speaking of spin-offs, there's yet another lawyer show from David E. Kelley, a hand-off from The Practice (which ended last year): this one is called Boston Legal (not to be confused with Boston Public). This show is excellent, but less for the writing than it is for the two stars: James Spader (Alan Shore, the brilliant deviant with a heart of gold) and William Shatner ("Denny Crane!" the bombastic narcissist with incipient Alzheimer's). Rene Auberjonois does well as a senior partner (rounding out the three sci-fi alumni), as does Candice Bergen, who started late, but got off to a resounding start. The show's plots are standard Kelley fare, but Spader and Shatner give the series its real life.

And finally, there's 24, in its fourth season. Thankfully, they've given up on the whole Kimberly-Bauer's-damsel-in-distress routine after three seasons, but they're still in their how-can-we-drag-Jack-Bauer-back-to-CTU-even-though-he's-left phase. We're also still seeing the old someone-at-CTU-is-a-mole (when will they ever learn?), and the petty office politics--but there are compensations. Seriously, though, I'd like to see them just put Bauer back in charge at CTU and for once have there be no moles or traitors, and see if they could build a good season with that.

This time the bad guys kidnaped the Secretary of Defense and his daughter (coincidentally Jack's new boss and lover, those terrorists just won't leave him alone), but that was just cover for a much bigger and insidious plot. Halfway through the season, the main threat seems to have been shut down, but naturally there will be something new coming up, unless they just want to show multiple-frame shots of all the characters sleeping for the next 12 hours with the clock ticking away ("be-boom, BE-boom; be-boom, BE-boom! ... snooore!"). Or maybe Kimberly will suddenly appear only to be kidnaped again.

All kidding and convenient plot points aside, the show is actually pretty good action-adventure, and has been through it's four years on the air. There are some good twists and turns, interesting characters, and some rousing action sequences. Though there is one questionable point: they seem to be getting carried away with the torture issue. At first, the series had Bauer killing or torturing only in extreme moments, but now it seems like someone's getting tortured every episode (Jack's boss' son, two CTU employees, a terrorist suspect, and Jack's lover's ex-husband are the ones that come to mind immediately). You begin to wonder if this is Rupert Murdoch's way of desensitizing the public or simply popularizing the practice. Either way, it could get tiring pretty quick. But despite that nit, the show is still well worth watching.

The Sixth Estate

By way of a reader on Kevin Drum's site, this interesting aspect to a bill before Congress, in reference to making Freedom of Information Act requests:

Section 552(a)(4)(A)(ii) of title 5, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following: ‘‘In making a determination of a representative of the news media under subclause (II), an agency may not deny that status solely on the basis of the absence of institutional associations of the requester, but shall consider the prior publication history of the requester. Prior publication history shall include books, magazine and newspaper articles, newsletters, television and radio broadcasts, and Internet publications.

Well, this blog is undeniably an Internet publication. I may soon be legally a member of the news media. Granted, of course, that so might be millions of others. But still, it is a recognition of a new age of communication.

Now, I don't like people who throw around "age-of" designations like Bush hands out nicknames. But there is something important here to note.

Communication, in terms of reaching a large number of people with a message, has always been key to shaping public opinion, whether it be for politics, advertising, or any other matter. But communication has also always been expensive and involved, and thereby limited to a very few people. For the common man, public communication has always been limited to the reach of one's personal voice. If one were lucky, one might reach a few hundred people. If extraordinary circumstances prevailed, one could draw thousands to listen to your message.

But to reaching a worldwide, nationwide, or even regional audience, there was a major roadblock. To do it by yourself, you could start a popular movement through the force of your cause, so much so that your message could not be kept down--but that is an extraordinary circumstance. Otherwise, you had to control a business which could produce newspapers, magazines or books, or could broadcast radio or television shows. Since this was far too expensive, you were limited to using other people's communication tools, and that meant that you had to ask editors and publishers. To have your message appear in a newspaper (even as limited as a letter to the editor), a magazine, in book form or broadcast to people, you had to first beg for the chance to speak before a small class of people who controlled those information channels. For the purposes of this writing, let's call them the "publishing class." The publishing class has always held the power to silence you, whether it was because they didn't like your message, or didn't think it would profit them--or even just from simple indifference.

This was akin to having a small class of people who control the roads. If you want to travel anywhere, you would have to ask the roadkeepers for access to travel. For whatever reasons they pleased, they could deny you access to the roads. If your business did not bring them money, they could refuse to give you the ability to travel. If they did not approve of your business, they could lock you into your village. They could block your ability to move simply because they didn't like the way you dressed, they way you walked--or even just for no reason at all. You would have the "freedom" to travel, but not the freedom to travel far without someone else's permission.

We talk about the vital importance of free speech. What we don't talk about is the freedom to speak far. And lines of communication to the world are just like roads to take you there physically. Speaking to a wide audience remained a privilege, mostly controlled by the publishing class. And that does not constitute equal speech, another aspect of communication justice which is often overlooked.

If you come to a public park, step up onto a soap box, and start speaking your mind without fear of being arrested, that's what we call free speech. But if I have a lot more money, and come to the park as well to speak, I can set up a huge stage with enormous speakers, have a rock band open for me, and then blare out my message in such a loud voice that even those who are still interested in your soapbox speech can't even hear you anymore. That's an example of unequal speech, and it is about as much of an injustice as taking away your freedom to speak at all. After all, what good is free speech if your message is squelched to insignificance?

Such were the limitations of pre-Internet communications: speech to anything more than a small group of people was limited by the whim of those who had more money and power than you.

The Internet is not the answer to the problem, but it is a giant step forward. There are still limitations: others with money and the control of other popular communication channels can still make more noise than you can, but at least you have now been given a new, free channel all your own, kind of like a personal loudspeaker that can cut through the noise that the publishing class makes.

Of course, you still have to attract the audience--no one is immune from that. Freedom to speak is not a guarantee that you will be listened to. Your message has to be of sufficient interest to make others pay attention. But if your ability to communicate is good enough, if your message is significant enough, then attention can be attracted. Your publication will be linked to, discussed, and advertised by word of mouth through a community far larger than the local one in which you reside. Many have already done it--many bloggers have reached even a huge audience. These are people whose voices might never have been heard otherwise.

So the new law being proposed is not a landmark because of the access or legal status that it would provide bloggers, but rather because it demonstrates the recognition of this new channel of communication--a new "estate" in the sense of post-revolutionary French politics. The "fifth estate" has always been what is beyond the media, the "new" voice of influence. But there have been enough voices beyond the fourth estate of the media to fill that category, and the channel that the Internet provides is revolutionary enough that I would see it as justifying a completely new estate all on its own.

So I say directly to the world. Or at least you people who decide read this blog entry, anyway.

Hey! No Fair!

When Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith is released worldwide, it will open on May 18th, 19th or 20th everywhere. Except Japan. Japan is the only country on the list with a release date later than that. And not just later, but considerably later. More than a month and a half later. What the heck is with that?!?

Can't be because of subtitling--Korea has the same concern and they open on May 20. Latvia and the United Arab Emirates get it on time. So what's holding things up here in Japan? Just asking.

The frustrating part is that by that time, the contents of the movie will be so widespread, so part of common knowledge that it will be well-nigh impossible not to see or hear stuff (called "spoilers") that you don't want to hear.

Okay, maybe Japan has O-bon season in August--but that's still a month away from the July opening date. And you'd think that this is a movie that kind of transcends holiday seasons.

Trekked Out?

Since Gene Roddenberry came back in 1987 to resuscitate Star Trek on television, it has been on the air in one form or another for the entire eighteen years up to today. In 1993, when The Next Generation had one year left, Deep Space Nine went on the air. A year later, Voyager joined in and the two Trek shows ran concurrently. When Voyager went off the air in the Spring of 2001, Enterprise picked up the ball that autumn and has been running since. TNG, DS9 and Voyager each ran for seven years before they were retired--but it looks like Enterprise will not be so lucky. After the end of this, its fourth year, Star Trek: Enterprise will face cancellation--and it looks like no fan uprising will keep it on the air.

The reasons for cancellation are pretty clear-cut: it's doing badly in the ratings, so much so that its rich demographics can't save it. Part of the ratings problems have to do with the fact that it is on UPN, which is not exactly a powerhouse of a network; part has to do with the fact that it has not been the most appealing show on the air; and part of it has to do with the fact that it was tossed into the Friday-night trash bin (like the original series was in the 60's) where it has languished this year. Paramount has its 100 episodes which will keep the show alive in syndication, and for them, that's all that is necessary. And hopes that the show might be picked up by the SciFi channel, like the popular, long-running Stargate SG-1 series (now in season eight) after Showtime axed it, have been dashed by Exec Producer Rick Berman, who says the show won't be shopped around.

Which is too bad for Enterprise, which was just getting its footing. Each Trek series got off and running at different times, and Enterprise, which got a good push last year with the season-long "Xindi" arc, has been doing much better this year, winding plotlines and Trek "history" from the original series into the Enterprise storylines. But probably the most important improvement has been that Rick Berman and Brannon Braga finally let go of their control to the show and gave it to Manny Coto, who improved the show tremendously. But it came too late--Berman and Braga let go only because they knew the show was doomed.

So now they're talking about giving the franchise a rest, which might not be such a bad idea. But what it really needs is new blood. Berman and Braga had been with Trek ever since it began its current run in 1987. Eighteen years is too long for two people to be in control of the franchise, and their stagnant direction has been one of the biggest reasons Trek has not been doing well. Hopefully, when Paramount decides to revive the franchise again in four or five years, they will be wise enough to seek out someone talented and fresh, with a respect for the show and the fans.

If Only Reality Followed Art

One of the DVDs I got for Christmas was the Third Season of The West Wing. It's a great show simply on dramatic and writing merits, but there are parts which are simply inspiring. One episode, "H. Con-172," has both the Republicans and the President each performing their own class act, acts of decency and rightness. In the story, it has come out that the President has multiple sclerosis, and was hiding that fact during the first election and the first three years of his presidency. The Republicans hold hearings to skewer the president and everyone they can get their hands on, but the committee chair Bruno (James Handy) and the Republican counsel, Clifford Calley (Mark Feuerstein), generously offer Leo McGarry (whose alcoholism and prior drinking problem are about to be exposed) a way out--censure of the president. And while Leo is outraged and refuses, in the end, Bartlet accepts:

LEO: Doing this to save me the embarrassment I've got coming to me is about the dumbest reason I can think...

BARTLET: There's another reason.

LEO: What?

BARTLET: I was wrong. I was. I was just...I was wrong. Come on, you know that. Lots of times we don't know what right or wrong is but lots of times we do and come on, this is one. I may not have had sinister intent at the outset but there were plenty of opportunities for me to make it right. No one in government takes responsibility for anything anymore. We foster, we obfuscate, we rationalize. "Everybody does it." That's what we say. So we come to occupy a moral safe house where everyone's to blame so no one's guilty. I'm to blame. I was wrong.

So often, you watch this show and think, man, that is really the way government ought to be run.

But you know it's not. Neither side. But we should start taking lessons.

Perception Reporting and the Death of Informed Consent

I'm getting sick and tired of the prevalence in the media of polls which report what people believe, which seem now to be the norm in terms of informative stories in the press. It seems that spin has all but erased the possibility of objective journalism. Instead of reporting what Social Security is, how it works, and what it is doing, for example, we get this story from the Washington Post:

A strong majority of respondents, 63 percent, do not think Social Security will have enough money to pay the benefits they are entitled to, and 74 percent think the system faces either major problems or is in crisis -- as Bush has asserted. The president also has at least general support from 53 percent of the public for the concept of letting people control some of their contributions to invest in the market.

The article then goes on to report on how this perception will play into the politics of the issue. This is just like the polls on whether you believed Scott Peterson was guilty or not. Not being on the jury, how could you possibly make an informed decision? The results of these polls are worse than useless.

There are far too many stories out there of the type I quote from above; you see them all the time. It seems that almost all news reporting nowadays is based on this kind of journalism, and not on edifying the public. Since when did public perception of the truth trump the actual truth in journalism? The role of the press, if I am not mistaken, is to inform and educate the public in matters of importance. People are obviously making up their minds about social security and solidifying their stands without having the slightest clue about what anything is about on the issue. We get far better information in ballot pamphlets on referendums, when an issue is carefully spelled out and various views given. But we don't have that in the press today, we have something more akin to a popularity contest. News organizations are not giving us information, they've turned into 24-hour spin machines.

What we need is more primers like this one from CNN/Money, which lays out the Social Security system, what the suggestions are, and what the possible fallout could be from any particular plan. It is simple and informative. It should, ideally, be followed by links to various other explanations, each one presenting a further level of detail, with access to information sources and links to opinion pieces. In other words, the facts should be laid out by the press so the people can read, learn, understand--and then decide. But such primers are rare, especially in contrast to the stories about spin. Right now we're simply assaulted with plans by politicians neck-deep in spin and then quizzed by the media about how they sound, the results of which are them used to "inform" us (regurgitation, not nutrition), and gauge how politically viable the plans are.

It is, in short, a joke.

The public needs information. Data. Facts. Explanations. Not spin, not polls, not uninformed reactions, not spin on uninformed reaction based on polls based on spin.

But then, I am probably asking for too much, aren't I?

Ask yourself, have you made a decision, even a tentative one, on what course to take on social security? If so, what is that decision based upon? Are you truly informed? Answer some very fundamental questions to find out:

1. The taxes paid by workers will exceed the benefits paid to retirees until what year?

a. 2018
b. 2042
c. 2052
d. 2100

To see the answer to any one question, select the text in the black box to reveal the answer:

a. 2018

2. Will Social Security be "out of money" by that year?

a. yes
b. no

b. No. It can draw from Treasury notes for some time after that.

3. When will Social Security really be out of money?

a. 2028
b. 2042
c. 2052
d. 2100

"b" or "c", depending on who you go by. But even then, it will still have enough funds to pay for 75% or 80% of benefits.

4. True or false: Bush's plan will put more money into the system, staving off a financial crisis in Social Security.

False. It will remove as much as 1/3 of the fees paid into the system, which will quicken the day when it runs out, leading to an earlier crisis.

5. Bush will pay for this by:

a. Borrowing trillions of dollars, adding massively to the deficit
b. Raising taxes in general
c. Raising payroll taxes, raising the retirement age, and/or reducing benefits
d. The system will magically pay for itself

If you answered "d", then you are most decidedly a Republican. "a" is what Bush is saying now, but as with so many of Bush's plans, the major costs come long after he's out of office. A combination of "a", "b", and "c" is more likely, though that's just my opinion.

It is very likely that you did not know the correct answers to many of the questions above. And you may very well be more informed than the people answering those polls. A simple understanding of the system leads you to the simple conclusion that you don't solve a financial crisis in social security by depriving it of up to 1/3 of its funds--but this is not reflected in what the media is reporting because they tend to forget to inject the facts into the equation at some point. We blame Bush and Cheney for making 70% of Americans think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11, but the fact is that the media creates these impressions by simply reporting spin and then reporting on public perception of the spin. If more journalists reported on facts instead of spin, more news readers would make decisions informed by facts, not by what politician's delivery they like best, which party they belong to, or what opinion is prevailing so I can follow the winning side.

People, let's keep a lookout for primers. If you send me the address of a primer on any major topic of the day--not an opinion piece left or right, nor a fake primer by a leaning source, but a real, informative, balanced primer, I'll post it here. If I get enough, I'll make a special part of the page or a new page to hold them. Let's start with Social Security. I found the one at CNN/Money; any other ones out there?

Parasitism: Who's Leeching Whom?

Well, the MPAA is now going after BitTorrent and eDonkey, trying to shut them down like the RIAA tried to do with KaZaA, and Napster before that. While the RIAA got Napster, KaZaA is still out there, just as Gnutella is still going strong. Considering the worldwide structure of the filesharing networks, it is doubtful that they will make much of a dent.

Then there is the question of whether or not sales are affected. Despite online downloads of movies, DVD sales remain spectacular, so much so that they actually outstrip box office sales--DVDs now represent 60% of the film industry's revenue, and films are beginning to sell more in DVD form than at the theater. So how is it that BitTorrent downloads are killing the industry?

This is the same lame argument made by the RIAA, which studies (such as this or this, PDF files) have continually dismissed. Sales did not decline until after Napster shut down, and losses generally match major economic trends--not to mention the fact that music sales took a downturn just the the music industry drastically cut the number of new releases they generated--hmmm, they put less music on sale and music sales fall, what could possibly be the correlation?

My favorite quote from these stories, however, is this:

John Malcolm, the MPAA's director of worldwide antipiracy operations, said: "These people are parasites, leeching off the creative activity of others."

Ah. The downloaders are leeches on the creative activity... not the labels and studios that consistently rip off and abuse the artists? Please. No big industrial media firm is ever going to get my sympathy by claiming their "creative activity" is being "leeched" when they're doing what they're doing. Take Forrest Gump, for example: the film cost $55 million to make, probably about as much to promote, and it grossed $660 million at the box office alone--add a few hundred million for DVD sales--and yet Paramount claimed that it didn't make any profit, and refused to pay the author, Winston Groom, a single penny of the "net profit" they had promised him. This is hardly uncommon--Hollywood, just like the recording industry, makes it a standard practice to vastly underpay the artists and overcharge the consumers. They steal billions, then cry poverty, outrage and parasite at the filesharing phenomenon.

Hypocrites. I have no sympathy for them at all, only contempt.

Forced DVD Trailers

Okay, so it's not earth-shatteringly important. But I am sick and tired of paying twenty bucks for a DVD, only to be forced to watch commercials! That's one of the big reasons why you get a DVD, so you don't have to watch it on commercial TV. I just got my first Amazon shipment of DVDs that I'm ordering, and wanted to check out Shrek 2. But before you get to the main menu, you have to sit through 'previews' of upcoming stuff they're working on. In this case, two trailers for Dreamworks features. The skip and menu features are disabled here. This, thankfully, is not on most DVDs, but Disney has them a lot, and now Dreamworks, it seems. You ask me, whatever genius decided to add the "feature" to disable such things on DVDs should be taken out and shot. A DVD player which could override such blocks would be worth buying, if they could make such a thing. Fortunately, the fast-forward feature still works on the Shrek DVD, and you can get through the trailers after a minute or so--often times, the forced trailers do have some way of getting around them, but you have to try three or four things before you find them.

Now, I've bought perhaps over 100 DVDs, a sizable investment, largely because the prices are usually just reasonable enough--but the forced trailers are exactly the kind of thing that would drive me to download the movie from the Internet instead. Commercials are for people who don't pay. Not for people who just coughed up some cash for the media. Pardon my opinion.

By the way, if you are considering buying the Shrek 2 DVD, and one of the factors pushing you in that direction is the "all-new surprise ending," then pull back--it's not what you think. It's not a new ending, it's simply another karaoke video like they had on the end of the first film. If you like that, then great--and I like the film enough to want to have the DVD anyway--but this is one of those cases of blatant false advertising.

The Larry King Effect

Can we stop hearing about this guy now?

There's come to be a certain phenomenon whereupon relatively average cases with no celebrities or political figures come into the national spotlight because of initially isolated media coverage, and the Scott Peterson case is one of them. One nexus where these cases begins is the Larry King show, which, when not commemorating Republican presidents, 60's crooners, psychics or other assorted guests, can, at the drop of a hat, become almost solely dedicated to a single criminal case. Although centered around a politician, the Gary Condit/Chandra Levy case was similar in nature; until 9/11 hit, the Larry King Live Show was practically the Condit/Levy Show, nonstop. When Peterson's case came up, despite the fact that it was a relatively average homicide case, King's intense coverage made it a media circus.

What real need is there for us to focus on this stuff? I really believe in curtailing the freedom of the press in cases like these, where it can be pretty certainly determined that the vital interest of the public is pretty much nil, and the destructive influence on fair trials is maximized. We should have laws that shroud criminal proceedings unless some actual public interest is being endangered; whoever said that the free press right in the Bill of Rights should outweigh all other rights, like that to a fair trial? The public's rubbernecking peep-show interest in cases like this is surely not as important as making sure that justice is done.

Shameless Plug (or: What I'm Getting)

Okay, it's time for me not only to brag about the DVDs I'm purchasing, but to see if I can ramp up the hits and possibly purchases on my Amazon Associates account! See, I'm being up-front about it. They're not needed to run this site, I'm gonna do this blog anyway; it'd just be a nice 4% gift for me, is all. If you're going to purchase any of the following DVDs from Amazon anyway, why not give me a cut and buy them through a link on this page? You don't have to buy the item immediately, by the way; if you put it on your wish list it'll still count, but only if you buy it within 24 hours after following the link(s) from this page. Or you could put it in your shopping cart immediately and let it sit as long as your cookies last (usually 90 days), doing the actual purchase later.

I do these DVD buys every Christmas, by the way, when I go back home to visit. It saves shipping costs to Japan, and I can watch the Region 1 DVDs on any one of my DVD players (the one I brought from the U.S., and the region-free player I bought at Costco later, as well as the DVD drive on my computer). The Japanese versions of these DVDs not only cost a whole lot more, but they often lack the special features like commentaries and such.

First off, the boxed sets. I'm getting the three Harry Potter films, more of a bundle than a real boxed set, so the reviews say. But it's at a good price (average of $15 per 2-disc set), so why the heck not. I'd rather not wait another six to ten years for the rest of the DVDs to come out and buy it in one grand set. Then there are the guy-film action adventure sets, the Die Hard films 1-3, and the four Lethal Weapon films. Yeah, I know. But they're fun. Though the Lethal Weapon series was turning into a Warner Brothers cartoon at the end there. If there's a #5, it'll probably be animated. Those last two sets are also under $40, for a three- and four-DVD set respectively. I'm also continuing to get the M*A*S*H series, season number seven for me (I probably will skip seasons eight and nine, though, and get the final season only after this).

More on the PBS side is Jim Henson's Storyteller series, the original and the Greek Myths. This was a short-lived series I enjoyed a while back, narrated by William Hurt. The episodes are very well presented, and I was pleased to find them out on DVD. Now if they'd just release the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (and at a reasonable price, I'd hope).

Some old comedies which came down in price enough for me to get: All of Me, the Martin/Tomlin vehicle which was one of Martin's best. The beautiful Harold and Maude, which I first saw in high school, hilarious black comedy. Foul Play, a film with 'made-for-TV' written all over it, but still a really good comedy flick. The martial arts battle between Burgess Meredith and Rachel Roberts, as well as the elderly Japanese couple in the limo make the film watchable all by themselves. Then there's Silver Streak, the first and best film with the Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor duo, and the best.

I'm also getting The Life of Brian, for reasons that should be obvious (shame on you if you don't know); and Sabrina, the original Billy Wilder Bogart-Hepburn-Holden classic (not the remake); the special edition of This Is Spinal Tap (with the actors doing commentary on the film in character as the Spinal Tap band, acting again as if it were a real doc). And ones that I'm less than proud of advertising but am getting because they're at least acceptable, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Martin's The Man With Two Brains, and Short's Innerspace.

Though I hate him as governor, Schwarzenegger was in some good films. Total Recall was not one of them, but it's a fun piece of bloody fluff along the lines of Robocop, and I'm interested in what the Verhoeven-Schwarzenegger commentary will be like, and it's just ten bucks. I'm also getting Terminator and Terminator 2 (number three was just Schwarzenegger, not Cameron, and wasn't worth it).

And finally, the new films out: Shrek 2 (the extras are pretty good), and the final Lord of the Rings special extended edition, The Return of the King. The extended editions are still only $24, and this'll complete the set for me. The extended RotK runs 250 minutes! Add that to the 208 for the first film, and 223 for the second, and the entire extended edition would run a total of 11 hours and 21 minutes! That's what you call a long film. Sako, you still up for that marathon we talked about?

On DVD and HD-DVD and Downloading

Boy is this guy stupid:

"...it's a heavier download. That's why we're pushing to get HD-DVD in place," added Parsons. The new technology...has far greater storage capacity than DVDs currently on the market.

"Right now, you can probably download a DVD in two, three hours," said Parsons. "This HD-DVD product is a day's download. And that'll be a big step [for the industry], to make downloading just super, super, super inconvenient."

First of all, this guy must have terrific bandwidth. If he's talking about downloading a whole 4.7- or 8.5 GB DVD in "two, three hours," he must have blazing DSL or maybe a fiber-optic connection, and constant private access to someone with significant upstream broadband. To download a 25- to 27 GB HD-DVD in a day would require similar feats of downloading magic. Most people don't get that kind of speed, meaning that even much smaller downloads can take days or even weeks, and that doesn't faze most downloaders. They just leave their computer on all day and let things download in the background. Doesn't matter much to them.

Right now, downloading a whole DVD is inconvenient for many, unless they have significant broadband. Which is why ripped DVD movies are typically not downloaded whole at original size. Instead they are compressed into much smaller files for easier downloading. An 8-GB DVD is stripped of its extras and the core movie file compressed into a 700 MB file, which can fit on a single CD-R for storage and is still of fairly good quality. That's what might take 2-3 hours--the compressed movie, not the whole DVD--and even then, only if you've got blazing bandwidth and are using the right service, like BitTorrent. Introducing HD-DVD would be no different--it just means a slightly different encoding job for the pirate who originally rips the movie. The time difference won't be so great unless the whole DVD, uncompressed, is made available for downloading, or if the movie file is not compressed as much--but it's the choice of the pirate, not the format of the DVD that determines things.

Not to mention that broadband is increasing. On clients like BitTorrent or Shareaza, with tracker sites like Suprnova or Youceff many complete DVDs are indeed made available whole, because many downloaders do now have the sufficient bandwidth--or extreme patience--to download such a large file. Now, HD-DVDs will not become a popular standard for many years--by which time, broadband will have increased to the point where downloading larger files is even easier.

So in short, the HD-DVD files will be downloadable just like today's DVDs are, with or without compression. Changing the format will do little or nothing to stop piracy. What stops piracy most is making the media itself cheap--which many DVDs are, certainly in contrast with music CDs. How many people are gonna sit and wait three weeks for a download to complete, then have to go through burning the DVD or CD (not always simple) just so they don't have to pay ten bucks to get the original product, which has better quality and features? Not enough to matter, that's for certain. As with downloaded music CDs, downloaded DVDs are not really any threat to the media conglomerates. They just love to act like they're the victims of something.

The Sweet Frustration of Hypocrites

Well, it seems that the protest against the Sinclair broadcast intended to smear Kerry was successful; at least from the far-right perspective of Freepers, judging from their strangled, frustrated whining, the show was relatively balanced. Their bald ambition to have it be a savage attack on Kerry is undisguised:

Seriously though, I'm mad. This is stupid, and it's not making Kerry look bad. Then they showed a little hit piece on President Bush. Did Sinclair cave or what??------------------This thing sucks. Anything postive for the POWs and vets is "BALANCED" by whack jobs for kerry. Now they're doing the Bush AWOL thing - I am blocking SINclair on my box - what a setup! - It's on tape but I think I'll burn it. ARRRRRRRRRRRGH!------------------Sinclair is apparently a bunch of linguini-spined cowards who decided to chop up the documentary and insert so much cognitive dissonance as to make it useless. Shame on them! SHAME!

Hee hee, that's fun to read. Serves 'em right. This is the same crowd that howled bloody murder when the Reagan miniseries was to show--getting it bumped to cable--and that wasn't about a candidate and it wasn't two weeks before an election. With that miniseries, as you'll recall, Republicans demanded to screen the miniseries beforehand, and if they didn't like it, then they would demand a scrolling subtitle be constantly shown to emphasize that the series was fiction. Not so it would be balanced, but so it would be either sympathetic to their views or fully discredited as untrue. If they can justify that but then rail against this, they are quite clearly raving hypocrites.

Clearly the pressure put on Sinclair was effective. After their stock fell and their advertisers scattered, they announced that they were planning a "balanced" show after all--but no one doubts that if not for the protest, they would have shown only the smear documentary, possibly followed by a panel show, as they had originally announced. But even then there would have been the question of legality; it might have been more than fear of losing sponsors, if Sinclair had aired the anti-Kerry doc as originally planned, they could have been hit with lawsuits and possibly even lost their license.

It should also be noted that maybe the show wasn't quite son easy on Kerry as the Freepers feared; after all, their wing-nut view may just make them feel that the show wasn't an anti-Kerry screed; one of them points out, "It doesn't suck; it's just not slash and burn. Try to remember that the rest of the world isn't quite as strident about John Kerry as we are." To say the least.

It'll be interesting to see what the non-far-right-loony reaction is. But reading through the hundreds of posts by screaming, outraged Freepers is fun.

Sinclair Plans to Abuse the Airwaves

In yet another demonstration of the right-wing nature of the media, Sinclair Broadcasting is planning to cancel regular prime-time programming two weeks before the election and instead give up their air time for free to broadcast a film that would smear John Kerry. Sinclair, along with Fox and Clear Channel, is well-known as a bastion of conservatism and has been known to take similar types of action before, such as when they refused to air Ted Koppel's "Nightline" when they spent the entire broadcast honoring the fallen American soldiers in Iraq. Sinclair called the memorial "contrary to the public interest." In a pathetic attempt to give the appearance of fair play, Sinclair plans to follow the 90-minute smear ad with a "panel discussion" to which Kerry is invited. The invitation, which they knew Kerry would have to be insane to accept, is their way of weaseling out of giving Kerry "equal time."

In case Sinclair forgot, the airwaves are owned by the public; Sinclair's action is nothing less than the use of public resources to air political propaganda, timed just before an election.

Remember how, just a few months ago, conservatives tried to ban any TV commercials for "Fahrenheit 9/11" because it could be construed as a political ad? Then what the hell is this? The complaint against commercials for F-9/11 might have been legitimate had they referred to any actual planned airing of commercials mentioning Bush 60 days before an election, but there were no commercials for the film planned during that time period, so the FCC concluded there was nothing to act on. This documentary, which very noticeably mentions Kerry and would be broadcast within the 60-day restriction, should be illegal itself under the same law used by conservative groups to try to silence Moore.

Don't think this qualifies as a campaign ad? The filmmaker is Carlton Sherwood, a former journalist for the right-wing Washington Times (owned by Rev. Sun Myung Moon), who later worked for Tom Ridge and finally was hired by the Bush administration to handle PR for Homeland Security. Carlton was arrested in 1983 for illegally taping a conversation, and in 1984 falsely accused Vietnam vets of misspending money for the Vietnam memorial.

If the broadcast is, in the end, allowed, then a panel discussion won't be enough; Kerry should be given the exact same time slot one week later to run any damned thing he pleases.

Send email to the FCC expressing your outrage at this plan. The addresses are:

michael.powell@fcc.gov
kathleen.abernathy@fcc.gov
michael.copps@fcc.gov
kjmweb@fcc.gov
jonathan.adelstein@fcc.gov

Postscript: in case you thought that perhaps the guy running Sinclair is a paragon of virtue, check this out. He's still President and C.E.O., by the way.

Update: The DNC has decided to file formal charges against Sinclair with the FEC on Tuesday, calling the infraction "Sinclair Broadcasting's illegal in-kind contribution to the Bush-Cheney campaign." The FEC is closed until Tuesday because of Columbus Day.

Meanwhile, people against Sinclair's plans have wasted no time, and a variety of sites are now up and running, including this site to boycott Sinclair, with a list of their advertisers; give as many as you can a call. Also sign this petition. DailyKos is all over this one, and will likely continue to be.

Update 2: Morons.org has a pretty good rundown on how the Sinclair move violates Federal Election Law. It seems pretty clear that Sinclair's action is completely illegal.

Return of the Sneer

You gotta love the title of this Seattle PI story:

Darth Cheney meets Luke Edwards

FOX Reports Fiction, Then Changes without Comment

Atrios caught FOX News representing the Republican group "Communists for Kerry" as an actual pro-Kerry group, when in fact it is a Republican group running a "satire" web site. The original FOX story read:

Of course, there were some Kerry supporters in attendance who had no doubts whatever about their candidate.

"We're trying to get Comrade Kerry elected and get that capitalist enabler George Bush out of office," said 17-year-old Komoselutes Rob of Communists for Kerry.

"Even though he, too, is a capitalist, he supports my socialist values more than President Bush," Rob said, before assuring FOXNews.com that his organization was not a parody group. When asked his thoughts on Washington's policy toward Communist holdout North Korea, Rob said: "The North Koreans are my comrades to a point, and I'm sure they support Comrade Kerry, too."

It is unclear whether the Kerry campaign has welcomed the Communists' endorsement.

Apparently, word got back to FOX that they had screwed up yet again, and so they altered the story, without comment or explanation, at the exact same address of the original story:

And then there were the pranksters in the audience . . . the Communists for Kerry (who, in fact, are rooting for Bush) and the Billionaires for Bush (who, of course, are Kerry supporters).

"We're trying to get Comrade Kerry elected and get that capitalist enabler George Bush out of office," said 17-year-old Komoselutes Rob of Communists for Kerry.

"Even though he, too, is a capitalist, he supports my socialist values more than President Bush," Rob said.

One would think that they would at least have the decency to post an Editor's Note explaining why they posted this fake story, like they did yesterday with the story that contained fake Kerry quotes.

I guess that fatigue and poor judgment must be endemic at FOX News.

Air America Breaking Out

After a beginning that has often been called "rocky," with both good and bad news, Air America Radio is settling in for the long run and beginning a slow but steady pace upward. The maverick network is bringing in more and more stations, including the usually conservative Phoenix AR, Albuquerque NM, Boston MA, and next week (finally!) San Francisco CA (in addition to being added to the cable Sundance Channel). Rochester NY, Denver CO, Atlanta GA and San Diego CA were recent big additions, and Washington DC is coming soon.

One of the reasons for the addition of new stations is the influence of its ratings: the Albuquerque station manager said he's picking it up because "It's shown legs in other markets, with the ability to garner ratings and revenues," and the Phoenix reporter notes that "[i]n Portland, Ore., radio station KPOJ jumped from No. 22 to No. 3 in the spring Arbitron ratings among listeners ages 25-54."

Additionally, the station has three million monthly listeners on its streaming Internet radio feed (Real Player required), not counting those who listen to the archived shows at Air America Place.

The network, despite the new expansions, is still in its infancy and will likely take a few years to grow into a name brand on the radio dial. But despite constant put-downs and predictions of demise from the right wing (I'm a Mac user, and am used to hearing people predict the death of Apple time and time again), the network is steady, successful, and growing.

Fahrenheit 9/11 DVD Release Date Set; Pre-Order Available

As Moore's film nears the $150 million mark (domestic and overseas), its position at the box office has fallen enough (making only a few million dollars a week, in only 700+ theaters now) so that the DVD release can be announced. So the release date has been set for October 5th--still giving the film enough time to make several million more at the box office, but coming out on video almost a month before the November 2 elections.

That is clearly in line with Moore's intentions to get as many people as possible to see the film. And since DVD sales often outpace box office sales, it is likely a lot of people will be getting the DVD.

If you're one of those people, Amazon.com is your likely shop of choice; Fahrenheit 9/11 is available for pre-order, for $19. The DVD will include: "The Release of Fahrenheit 9/11" featurette, a montage of the people of Iraq on the eve of invasion, Homeland security: Miami style, Outside Abu Ghraib Prison, Eyewitness account from Samara, Iraq, More with Abdul Henderson, Lila Lipscomb at the Washington, D.C. premiere, Arab-American comedians' acts and experiences after 9/11, Condoleezza Rice's 9/11 Commission testimony, and the Rose Garden press briefing after 9/11 Commission appearance.

The film, by the way, has been shunned by the supposedly non-partisan military establishment. The film is not showing in theaters on U.S. bases, despite the fact that every other film that makes so much money is quickly snapped up. The claim is that it was "too late" to put it into military theaters, among a host of other phony reasons, but the fact is that Lion's Gate made the film available from the beginning. It is not surprising, considering that the same people, in a "balanced" way, program Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura and Paul Harvey, but no liberal counterweight, on the armed forces network. The claim there is that they only broadcast "the most popular" radio shows. But not the most popular movies, which happen not to be in line with right-wing standards? Please.

I was hoping to write Part II of my review of the film after seeing it again yesterday, but since it was massively sold out, I'll have to refer to alternate sources to finish it; hopefully I'll have it ready in the next few days.

Fahrenheit 9/11 in Japan: Sold Out

The day's tickets, sold out by noon.

Well, I wanted to see F-9/11 again today, and planned to go with a colleague from school. It was playing today at the Ebisu Garden Cinemas, on both screens. My colleague and I agreed to meet at the theater at 2:30 so we could see the 3:10 show. But when I went, I figured I would be smart: I would get there at 2:00, a half hour early, so I could be sure to get a ticket.

Well, you can guess what happened. I was too late. By about four hours. Apparently, when the tickets went on sale at 9:30 am, there was already a big line, which eventually stretched out to longer than a city block. The whole day's tickets were already sold out before noon, and the tickets to the 3:10 show were gone well before that. Lauren Shannon, who went very early to get tickets for the 11:30 show, couldn't get anything before the 3:10 show, and eventually wound up giving her tickets to a couple who came all the way from Chiba and found the day sold out.

It may be the first day, a special showing and all--but the fact that so many people came, so early, and some from so far away, are all suggestions that this film will be a very big hit in Japan. Already this film has grossed $114 million in the U.S. and $32 million overseas as of a week ago--with Japan it will without doubt break the $150 million mark--and it still hasn't been released in Russia, Italy, Greece, Scandinavia, and a dozen other countries; receipts from Mexico, Egypt, Switzerland and a dozen more have still not been tabulated into that total. And then there will be DVD sales, often matching or exceeding domestic ticket sales. For a documentary, this is beyond extraordinary.

And the audiences are... sometimes interesting, as evidenced below. As many of us sat outside (having arrived early, I was waiting for my colleague, and others were taking care of a get-out-the-vote drive), we noticed two gentlemen in robes--clearly monks--talking to reporters outside the entrance. I would've loved to know what they were saying about the film...

DNC Speeches at Apple iTunes Music Store

Kudos once again to Mark at VuDeja for a brilliant heads-up:

The DNC Speeches are available as audio books, for free, downloadable from the Apple Store. Way Cool. At this moment, only the first two days' speeches are there; expect the third and fourth to appear soon.

You have to have an account at the store, which means you need a credit card with a U.S. (or European now, I suppose) billing address. There's no cost to sign up, you just have to register the credit card number. Then you can download the volumes for free. Apple also gives away one free track of music each week, BTW.

DNC Speeches Online

I have had several requests for finding the speeches at the Democratic National Convention. The best place I know is at the Convention web site. The speeches are available in Quicktime and Windows (both streaming), with a live streaming feed as well. I am using that live feed right now because Typhoon #10 has just knocked out my cable service, as storms do all too often around here. As it happened, the cable service crapped out right in the middle of Edwards' speech. Thank goodness for the Internet!

And Even More Liberal Press Bias

The first day of the Democratic convention was startlingly effective, with fantastic speeches that energized the crowd and helped define the essence of the Democratic party, with speakers Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, and Hillary and Bill Clinton making memorable, pointed remarks that would have a great impact on the American public.

If they ever get to see them--after all, there turn out to be even more incredible and earth-shaking stories out there: Teresa Heinz Kerry told a reporter to "shove it" and John Kerry wore a clean-room suit.

I mean, come on.

The Teresa Kerry matter was baldly misrepresented in the press. In the reports I've seen, they showed Teresa making a statement about needing "to turn back some of the creeping un-Pennsylvanian and sometimes un-American traits that are coming into some of our politics." That followed by a reporter asking her about the meaning of the word "un-American," followed by her coming back later and telling him to "shove it." Posed that way, it made Teresa look bad, especially when they pointed out that she had just "criticized the tenor of modern political campaigns."

But the reports were edited. They did not tell us the fact that the reporter, Colin McNickle, was a far-right-wing opinion columnist and editor for a staunchly conservative newspaper owned by right-wing hatchet man Richard Scaife, and had been hassling Kerry--they took the few moments of the conflict completely out of context. They did not show McNickle claiming that Heinz-Kerry had said "un-American activities," a misquote with McCarthyist connotations. Teresa did goof--instead of saying, "I did not say 'un-American activities," she said, "I did not say activity or un-American." In fact, she did say "un-American." But McNickle also did misquote her, giving her words a McCarthyist spin. And Teresa did say something that she shouldn't have.

However, she was justified--she had been misquoted, and goaded, by an antagonistic reporter. But the press ignored all that, edited and colored the episode to make her look bad, supposedly because it was a lot flashier to focus on a potential first lady saying "shove it" on TV.

And then John Kerry, at the Florida Space Center, visited one of the shuttles, and like everyone else, put on a clean suit. Yes, he looked a bit funny. But a "Michael Dukakis moment," as one CNN reporter put it? Give me a break. It was a clean suit, they all look like that, he would have been irresponsible to refuse to wear it, and while funky, it was not ridiculous.

But Kerry in the clean suit and Teresa saying "shove it" were the big stories. All over the place. Top coverage.

The speeches by senior statesmen, former presidents, important people, which pointed out that the country is on the wrong track and needs to be corrected? That the economy has to be reversed, good jobs have to be created, real attention paid to education and health care reform, those and so many other points that make up the Democratic message? The message that the press puzzles as to why it isn't being heard? Well, put on page two, boys, we can show pictures of Kerry in a clean suit and call him "Bubble Boy"!!

Not that this is new. The CNN lead after Al Gore's speech showed him in a photo-frozen pose looking stupid. As evidenced below that image, see other recent CNN photos of Gore:

Certainly not complimentary.

And Bush? Here are similar recent images:

Not exactly the same, are they?

Damn that liberal media! They always make the Democrats look so good, and never give Bush a break!

I mean, Bush fell off his bicycle--again!--just today, and not a word of it reaches the front pages. A president who can't even ride a bike, and Kerry wearing a clean suit beats that out? That's not equal reporting--if you're going to report trivial crapola mocking one candidate, then you do it for both. I wouldn't like to think about where my blood pressure would be if I had to endure FOX News, instead of just the moderately-right-wing CNN.

And while I'm at it, let's look at the press perpetuating lies and repeating bush talking points. The media outlets that did carry the Bush-bike story tended to explain it by saying that Bush rides his bike "hard," like he's a tough guy, not an uncoordinated weenie. They write gushingly that Bush "rides with abandon... takes on dangerous sections that would give veterans pause." And when speaking of his falling off his bike the last time, they repeat, as if it were fact, the assertion that Bush slipped on "soil loosened by rainfall," when in fact it had not rained there for more than a week.

Please. Just change your name to "Bush Campaign Headquarters" and be done with it.

Fahrenheit 9/11 Breaks $100 Million Mark

Just in over at Box Office Mojo. In fact, Mojo was a bit late with Saturday's numbers--those and Sunday's appeared roughly at the same time. Saturday's total was $101.6 million, and Sunday's grand total was $103.4 million. The film still stands to gross several millions per week for some time still--perhaps right up to the DVD sale in October (maybe September, but with the box office going like this, I doubt they'll rush the DVD sales too fast). DVD sales will also likely go through the roof, perhaps even outselling the theater revenues. Even for a regular motion picture, this box office milestone would be an achievement--for a documentary, it is historic.

Having seen the film, I would say that it is without question Oscar material--better than his Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine. But here's the thing: will he get an Oscar nod for this one?

From an artistic and/or technical standpoint, absolutely. But will politics interfere? Will everyone remember how the right wing exaggerated the booing from only a few audience members, and pilloried Moore because of it? Will the Academy chicken out and go the "safe" route? If Moore wins, will he be warned to not speak about politics, even though that's what the film is about, and a reference to it would be completely legitimate?

And here's one for thought: if Bush loses by only a few hundred, or even a few thousand votes, there will be little doubt that the film will have played a huge part in the election, as it would be safe to guess that at least that many people, out of the millions who will have seen the film, changed their vote due to watching it. Could the Academy deny an award to a documentary that not only deserves an Oscar solely on the basis of art, but also because it changes the course of history?

More Press Favoritism for Bush, Against Kerry

Yesterday, CNN Presents did a hack report on John Kerry--hardly more than a one-hour political attack ad. There was some positive content on Kerry, but most was negative, and each portion of the show was commented on by Republicans, who further attacked Kerry. Every aspect of Kerry's life was represented in a shady, selfish or just plain negative manner.

I do not recall any program about Bush being anywhere near as negative; they are usually love tomes, and I greatly suspect that if CNN Presents does a show on Bush on the eve of the Republican convention, it will not be nearly so critical, nor would it have Al Gore, Joe Conason and other liberal voices getting to dig in to Bush on every point. We'll see, but I'd be willing to bet quite a bit on the prediction.

A report on CNN News earlier today just outright lied: it said that Kerry was enacting "a shift away from" negative attack ads on Bush, and towards more positive, optimistic advertising. First of all, since Kerry started his national campaign, his advertising has been 73% positive, while Bush's has been 75% negative. That makes the reporter's claim an outright lie.

But more damaging is the insinuation: that Kerry has been negative, that it hasn't worked against Bush, that Kerry is changing strategies, a sign of weakness--and the story completely left out how negative Bush has been, and that he is not getting any more positive.

It is bitterly ironic that most popular press coverage is like this--slapping down Kerry and aggrandizing Bush--and then the press wonders aloud, "why is Bush staying so high in the polls, and Kerry can't seem to get ahead?"

Update: CNN finally provided a transcript of the report. The line in question is: "The upbeat tone, part of the ongoing shift away from criticizing Bush administration policies and toward a more optimistic message on the stump, leading up to the Democratic National Convention."

No evidence whatsoever is given to support this statement; as far as anyone can tell, this reporter simply pulled it out of his hiney.

At the time of this update, CNN Presents still has no transcript of their slime job on Kerry.

DAJ Members: The F-9/11 Segment is Airing on CNN Today

Mark and Vincentvds alerted me that the CNN story on us is airing today. Atika Schubert said our segment would be on Friday, but it seems to have been kicked back to today. It has aired a few times already, and will probably air more. It is appearing on World News, which will be on again at 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, and 8:00pm. I don't know if the segment will air each time, some of the times, or not at all again today, but I have the feeling it will.

I will also try to transfer this and what I have of the NTV report to digital video and host them on my site--I'll let you know when I can do that.

Fahrenheit 9/11: Review, Part I

So I saw the film on Tuesday at the Democrats Abroad Japan-sponsored press screening at the Toho Cinemas in Roppongi Hills, with a crowd of about 150, 110 of them guests of the DAJ. It was enjoyable just to be going to an event like that, but I appreciated much more being able to see the film before mid-August. And to see the film without commercials was even better.

Like most people, I had preconceptions about what the film was going to be like. We've seen the trailers and commercials showing some of Dubya's less-than-elegant moments. I expected a lot of funny moments, many I've which I'd already seen elsewhere, and a lot of biting, humorous commentary. I'd heard the reviews which talked about Lila Lipscomb, and her being the emotional heart of the film. But just by hearing about these things, you can't really even begin to get a sense of what you'll experience when watching this film.

Moore begins with the 2000 election in Florida. Even with a two-hour-long film, he has to gloss over quite a but: he doesn't explain that the angry mobs of "Floridians" at the recount are really Washington D.C. staffers for the GOP bussed in to shut down the vote count. He doesn't have time to cover the absentee-ballot fraud in Seminole and Broward counties, or how African-Americans were intimidated by the police presence on election day. He does mention how Harris got tend of thousands of legitimate voters, mostly Democrats, kicked off the voter rolls as "felons," and quickly mentions how the Supreme Court got Bush into office.

But he doesn't have to cover these too much in detail; he knows that many Americans are familiar with that territory, and wanted to show us some things most of us did not know--a style that he follows for the rest of the film. Much of what we see in Fahrenheit are things we never saw or heard or read about before, and that's a big part of what makes the film important. There are things the media doesn't tell us. Whether you agree with Moore's conclusions or not, it is fully worth seeing this movie just to see all the things that have been happening which you were not aware of.

For example, he shows us the joint session of the House and Senate meeting, and African-American House members, one after the other, raising objections to the certification of the election results. Each one calls into question the validity of the election--and each one is told to sit down, by none other than Al Gore (as President of the Senate), because none of the objections has been signed by the single required Senator in order to make the objection valid. The entire proceeding reeks of irony--the winner of the election certifying the loser as president, the Bush victory declared valid while the objections of those who represent the unjustly disenfranchised being told they had no voice. "The Senate is missing."

Moore continues the prologue with Bush's swearing in an subsequent fall in the polls, and then his long vacations--42% of his first nine months. The credits roll as Bush and his staff are dolled up for the cameras: it's showtime. And then he comes to 9/11. Artfully, he never shows us a plane hitting a building or a tower collapsing. He blacks out the film and gives us audio only, making the experience far more intense--and when he does show us the aftermath, he shows us only the faces of the witnesses, and the paper and other debris roiling in the clouds of smoke.

I was hoping to see the entire 7 minutes of video showing Bush sitting in the Florida classroom, having the minutes tick by as Moore commented on what was going on, perhaps even split-screen. Moore was much more merciful than that, instead flashing through the time with a clock showing at the bottom of the screen, then launching into how the Saudis--among them the bin Ladens, who despite their claims did indeed still have ties with their errant sibling.

Moore brings their departure--without the kind of interviews and screening that would have been mandatory in a case of far lesser impact--and uses it to introduce the Bush family history: Bush's ties with James R. Bath, a connection to the Saudis and bin Ladens, who financed Bush's early companies, which led to the Carlyle Group, which had strong ties with Bush Sr. and the Saudis, and so forth and so on. The ties are labyrinthine and damning, and you wonder how people could excuse the obvious influence. During the Clinton-Gore years, the GOP railed about the administration ties to the Chinese, which were almost completely fictional--and yet here we are in a War on Terror™, covering for the Saudis who finance and support those out to kill us, and no one has a problem with the president having the Saudis, and even the bin Ladens, as his financial backers throughout his career?

Surprising also is what you hear from Bush's own mouth: "When you're the president's son, and you got unlimited access, combined with some credentials from a prior campaign, in Washington D.C., people tend to respect that. Access is power. And I can find my dad and talk to him any time of the day." There he is, talking about abusing his family position to buy influence and power, as if this were appropriate.

You have to pay close attention during this sequence, because Moore moves back and forth between the pre- and post-9/11 days--perhaps intentionally blurring the lines to show us the relationships. Whether that was intentional, it works; we see the ties with Saudis and the censored 28 pages of the report; we see "Bandar Bush" and we see the secret service guarding the Saudi embassy. The 15 Saudi hijackers and Bush and Bandar dining as the Pentagon burned in the distance. Even without the juxtaposition, it would be hard to miss the connections, reeking of corruption.

And despite the necessity of going to war with Afghanistan to root out al Qaeda, Moore makes clear the ulterior motives behind the war there--Bush's prior meetings with Taliban officials and Unocal to build a pipeline through the country--and point out that the legitimate goals were never achieved while Bush's backdoor dealings were. This is perhaps the weakest assertion in the film, and yet it is still strongly supported, albeit circumstantially. After taking over Afghanistan, Bush put into power Hamid Karzai--a former Unocal advisor--as president, and appointed Zalmay Khalilzad, former chief consultant to Unocal, as the United State's special envoy to Afghanistan.

Within a few months of the invasion, Karzai signed an agreement to build the pipeline that Unocal wanted. Bush achieved that much. But the Taliban mostly got away (they are presently fighting back and taking territory) and Osama bin Laden and most of al Qaeda, its ranks swelling with new volunteers, also slipped the dragnet (Bush: "I don't know where [bin Laden] is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, to be honest with you."). So why did we invade Afghanistan? If it was to disable the Taliban and capture Osama and al Qaeda, Bush failed miserably. If it was to take effective control of the country, secure a military presence and build a pipeline, then mission accomplished. But that's not supposed to be why we went.

Moore also spends time on how the Bush administration uses the War on Terror™to frighten the public--something that most Americans discount or refuse to believe. After all, who would want to say that they could be frightened into toeing the line? But it is a strongly valid point, a technique used by oppressive governments throughout history, and Moore does an excellent job of showing how Bush gets the job done.

---

End of Part I of the review. Part II coming soon.

Fahrenheit 9/11: Press Screening (First Impressions)

I'm on the subway now, heading back home just a little after midnight. I just got out from seeing a special press screening of Michael Moore's movie at the Roppongi Hills cinema complex. That's the event that I've been hinting about for the past week or so, one that's been in the works a while at Democrats Abroad Japan. After attending the Democratic caucus earlier this year, I paid more attention to the DAJ, getting on the mailing list and sometimes contributing to the blog. That's how I found out that they were sponsoring a special press screening of the film tonight.

The film was more than I thought it was going to be. I had expected really not much more than a funny, biting polemic with a point of view, and certainly it was that. But it was more than I'd expected. Though I'd heard people talk about the film's emotional impact, I wasn't ready for what hit me. Yes, there are a lot of funny, sometimes hilarious bits with Bush and his staff, along with a variety of other politicians from both parties. There is irony and juxtaposition and a few good laughs. There are moments when you just roll your eyes or shake your head in exasperation at the outrageousness of what's being laid out in front of you.

But this film, while funny, biting, and full of information, has an intensely stirring force to it, a jolt to the system that can be as hard to take as it is intensely necessary to receive. There is a great deal about this film that deals with the high and mighty, the forces and nations, the numbers and statistics, but where Moore is most effective is at the individual level, where you see the impact that the past four years has had on the lives of so many. Moore knows that to express the pain and devastation of so many people, it's best to focus on one individual and see the full force of trauma on that person, at a level you can understand and empathize with. And then you realize that you have to amplify that feeling a thousand times and more, and then you get close to understanding what has been happening here.

Reading about all those people who had seen the film before as it opened in other countries, I'd heard of the standing ovations the film had gotten. And here we had this one viewing, filled with members and associates of Democrats Abroad. But this was no war-whooping crowd, and there was no standing ovation at the end. And it didn't seem strange. Not because the film was not appreciated--it was, more than you could know from reading this. And maybe it was not even because the film ended just shy of midnight, after a full work day on the hottest, most oppressive day of the year so far. It was partially because this particular crowd was so jaded, so familiar with the territory--and it had just been presented to us in a new way, one that made the entire thing so much more human, so much more frightening and so much more real. It was not a moment where anyone felt like cheering, it was a sobering feeling, like waking up even more. We weren't a crowd of film enthusiasts cheering the art, and we weren't a bunch of rabble rousers cheering a hatchet job. We were a group of serious people who just got the emotional wind knocked out of us, and felt more than ever the motivation to fight this fight, to change this unreal reality.

More later. I'm going to have to review the film's content more, explain a lot about what I've seen. More tomorrow, it's late.

But not too late.

Ratings for Air America Radio

The Air America Radio ratings are very strong, especially for a startup network with more than its share of birthing pains. The Franken show was not quite as strong as was hoped for, but it held its own, and the Majority Report dominated its time slot for talk radio.

According to Daily Kos, The Majority Report with Janeane Garofalo and Sam Seder won the #1 Talk Show slot in the ratings--beating out WABC's 2.7 with a 2.9 rating--in the key 25-54 demographic in New York City. Garofalo and Seder edged out Laura Ingraham on WABC, and absolutely smashed Michael Savage on WOR, which only got a 1.2 rating.

Al Franken's ratings were not quite as good as that, but they were still competitive. According to Hoffmania, in the 25-54 demographic, Franken scored a 2.2 versus a 2.7 by Limbaugh--not the trouncing we expected and hoped for, but still highly respectable considering that AAR began at pretty much zero. Considering that it took Limbaugh five years to reach even close to his present ratings levels, the fact that WLIB has gone from dead last to competitive in just three months is saying quite a bit.

Not that the conservatives will pay any attention to this; they'll point to the overall ratings, which include the above-55 numbers (weak for advertising) where WABC dominates. But where the ratings count, WLIB is holding its own against WABC. And as AAR continues to add stations--likely more and more, now that the first quarter's ratings are out and showing strong advertising prowess--the next year or so will tell whether AAR will survive, and perhaps become the leader in talk radio.

Special Announcement

Members of Democrats Abroad Japan, please visit the mailing list. You'll find a very special announcement there, and you'll want to make your reservations....

Hilarious Daily Show Bit

Saw it on the Daily Show Global Edition on CNN, it's priceless. Samantha Bee takes a look at Michael Wilson, the right-wing rip-off Moore-basher who's making the film "Michael Moore Hates America."

The video, titled "I Dislike Mike," is available along with lots of other video pieces (Real Player required) on the Daily Show site.

Wilson comes across looking like a complete doofus (which is probably not too far off the mark), and Moore makes a few really funny cameos with Bee.

You really have to see this, and it'd probably be a lot of fun to look around the site (especially for those of you based here in Japan, who don't get to see the show except for the boiled-down weekly edition).

Kashi 911

The date has been decided!

I just got off the phone with Gaga Humax, the information is not even up on their web site yet--but they have decided on an opening date for Fahrenheit 9/11 in Japan.

It will open exclusively at the Ebisu Garden Cinema in Tokyo on August 14th, and then open to a nationwide release in more than 140 theaters on August 21.

You heard it here first!

Update: And by the way, F-9/11 just broke the $80 million mark at the box office in the U.S.!

Another Update: Here is a partial list, in Japanese, of theaters nationwide which will carry the film. The list is not complete, and will be updated over time.

Fahrenheit with Legs? (Also: Japan Release Date News)

Fahrenheit 9/11 is doing very well, even better than expected, and this film might have a good set of legs, possibly generating million-dollar-plus daily grosses for weeks to come.

The film opened in 868 theaters as the highest-grossing film, beating out the opening weekend of the Wayans Brothers' film, White Chicks and the second weekend for DodgeBall and the Spielberg/Hanks film, The Terminal. In the first four days of its wide release, F-9/11 grossed $28 million, easily breaking the record for highest-grossing documentary that had been held by the nine-month release of Bowling for Columbine. The new film also broke record for per-screen grosses, pulling in about $9,000 per screen, even better than Spiderman 2 did on its opening weekend.

Even better news followed: F-9/11 held up well in the weekdays after the opening. Most films lose a huge chunk in those days, but Fahrenheit fell less than most films do, continuing to bring in between $3 million and $5 million per day during the week.

And more good news: Fahrenheit got a wider release, now in 1,725 theaters, and again, held up well for its second weekend, often a sign that the film will do well over time. It broke $50 million last Saturday, on its 8th day of wide release, and its second 4-day weekend gross was $22 million, just a 23% drop from the first. Compare that, for example, to the 50% drop for White Chicks.

The holiday weekend also helped F-9/11, with the revised Monday grosses ($5.75 million) besting Sunday's, for a grand total of $61 million so far. Excellent news. The third and fourth weeks will be more telling as to this film's longevity, though--and it may well have a good run, as there is great word-of-mouth, continuing controversy, and a lot of people who will be watching this film two, three, or even more times.

All of this is even despite the fact that the film faces a widely-reported (though not official) September DVD release, and is already available on the Internet for download. What's more remarkable is that Michael Moore has stated publicly that he is perfectly fine with people downloading the film: "I don’t agree with the copyright laws and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they’re not trying to make a profit off my labour. I would oppose that." Even more remarkable is that lion's Gate has also given a public-but-not-official OK for people to download the movie. That is unprecedented!

For those who want to see the online version, it can be found on Torrent (I recommend Shareaza for PC users, Limewire for Mac); the valid files are just over one gigabyte in size, in ".cue" format (you have to download a special program called VCD Gear to decompress), and it unzips into a folder containing two half-gigabyte MPEG files. The quality is fair, but too much of the sides are cropped out. Speaking for myself, I want to see it on the big screen first, and would use the downloaded version for reference after that while I see the film a second and third time at the cinema.

And now for the news the Japan crowd has been waiting for: I can't tell you a release date for F-9/11 in Japan yet, but I can tell you that Gaga Communications will be announcing its Japan release date this weekend--I just called them to find out. I will be calling them again the day they make the announcement, and will post it here immediately, so stay tuned. If you want immediate news, get an RSS feed program (for Macs, NetNewsWire Lite is the best, IMHO); just enter "blogd.com," or the Feed Address, or just look this site up under the program's "Site Drawer" (I'm listed under "Weblogs A-F").

The release date should be mid-August, perhaps around the 13th.

9/11, Military Families Urge Bush to see Fahrenheit 9/11

Actually, they want everyone in Washington to see the film--and while many will, it's a sound bet that Bush won't, and just as sound that few in Washington would change a bit, unless they felt pressured by a groundswell among their constituents.

Meanwhile, F-9/11 remains at the top of the box office through the early part of the week, losing less of its audience than other films, and now grossing a total $32.3 million through Tuesday. It should be interesting to see how F-9/11 will fare once Spiderman 2 comes out--will it be knocked way down in revenue? Will the increased number of screens prop it up? Or, under the rosiest scenario, will it both benefit from having more screens and catch most of the overflow from sold-out shows of Spiderman 2?

Wow!

According to PolkOnline.com ("Your guide to Polk County, Florida"), Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" will be coming to that area this Friday, after not being included in the original release. The site reports that F-9/11 grossed $24 million up to Monday, and no wonder--according to the site,

"'Fahrenheit 9/11' was released to approximately 868,000 theaters last week; however, this week only 19,000 are carrying the film, according to reports received from Dickinson Inc., Lakeland Square 10 Cinema's parent company."

Nearly a million theaters got the film! I didn't even know there were that many theaters! So Lakeland Square 10 Cinemas in Polk County must have been the only one not showing the film! Taking that number, on can figure that's about one theater for every 350 Americans, and it means that the per-screen gross up to Monday was just $27 per theater. What a let-down; no wonder 849,000 theaters dropped the movie by this week so only 19,000 are carrying it still.

F-9/11: Better then Expected...

As I had noted before, the $21.8 million weekend earnings for F-9/11 were estimates only, given before the weekend had even ended, and I was a bit cautious that perhaps the numbers might be higher than what the film would actually gross, though I was optimistic.

Well, I should have listened to my instincts. Fahrenheit 9/11 did not earn $21.8 million, it earned $23.9 million, $2.1 million more than expected.

Still No Japan Date for F-9/11

An update on the Japan release date for Fahrenheit 9/11: they still haven't set the date, but at least they got a little more specific than just "August" and are now talking about a mid-August release. Well, there's still time. No update on the Democrats Abroad Japan effort to get a special screening in July.

In the meantime, Rex Reed adds his own two-thumbs-way-up to the long list of ecstatic reviews of the film, while the all the newspapers are taking the industry estimates of F-9/11's weekend gross as fact (despite the fact that the weekend isn't over yet) and proclaiming the $21.8 million figure as set. I'm a little worried about this, as it is just an estimate--but not too worried, because the film is more likely to outperform rather than underperform the estimates.

To see exactly how much so, just take a look at some of the photos on Moore's site of the many screenings of the film across the United States--a few examples shown above, with F-9/11 showing every 45 minutes at one theater (top), and almost every show sold out at another theater (bottom).

By the way, when you see the "user ratings" for F-9/11 on many movie sites, keep in mind that practically all of the rock-bottom negative ratings are fake--disgruntled conservatives trying to skew the outcome. The ratings, as I mentioned previously, are starkly contrasted between 9s & 10s and 1s & 2s--very few ratings in between. So how can we know that the low ratings are fake and the highs, for the most part, are not? Because they've been polling people leaving the theaters in 15 cities and have found that 98% would "highly recommend the film."

Fahrenheit 9/11 Still Tops Box Office

F-9/11 still outgrossed all other films this Saturday, taking in an estimated $7.8 for a Fri-Sat $16 million-plus total. Box Office Mojo projects from this that the Sunday take will be $5.8 million, for a grand weekend total of $21.8 million--which would be greater than the $21.2 million that Bowling for Columbine took in over the course of nine months. Furthermore, F-9/11 still kept way ahead of all other films in per-screen revenue, taking in almost $9,000, more than three times the next-highest grossing film.

For a documentary, the is unheard of.

Changing Hearts and Minds

The reports are starting to come in, not of just liberal throngs at the movie theaters, but of moderates and even Republicans seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 and deciding to switch away from Bush.

Before the movie started, Leslie Hanser prayed.

"I prayed the Lord would open my eyes," she said.

For months, her son, Joshua, a college student, had been drawing her into political debate. He'd tell her she shouldn't trust President Bush. He'd tell her the Iraq war was wrong. Hanser, a 41-year-old homemaker, pushed back. She defended the president, supported him fiercely.

But Joshua kept at her, until she prayed for help understanding her son's fervor.

Emerging from Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, her eyes wet, Hanser said she at last understood. "My emotions are just... " She trailed off, waving her hands to show confusion. "I feel like we haven't seen the whole truth before."

And then:

For Richard Hagen, 56, it was the footage from Iraq: The raw cries of bombed civilians, the clenched-teeth agony of wounded American troops. A retired insurance agent from the wealthy River Oaks neighborhood in central Houston, Hagen described himself as a lifelong Republican. But then, standing by his silver Mercedes, he amended that: A former lifelong Republican.

"Seeing (the war) brings it home in a way you don't get from reading about it," he said. "I won't be voting for a Republican presidential candidate this time."

Mary Butler, too, may not bring herself to punch the ballot for Bush.

She didn't vote for him in 2000, but Butler, 48, said that until this weekend, she was leaning strongly toward supporting him this year. "In a war situation, I figured it was too hard to switch horses midstream. I thought the country would be too vulnerable," she said.

Butler, a librarian from suburban St. Louis, said one sentence in Moore's film made her rethink.

After showing faces of the men and women of America's military, Moore reminds his audience that they have volunteered to sacrifice their futures for our country. We owe them just one obligation, he says: To send them into harm's way only when we absolutely must.

That got Butler. She doesn't feel the war in Iraq fits into that category. And that one sentence -- a filmmaker's accusing voice-over -- might cost Bush her vote in the pivotal swing state of Missouri: "This is probably the strongest I've ever felt about voting against him," she said.

Just as the film has been far more successful at the box office than even the optimists predicted, it may well be far more successful at changing hearts and minds than many predicted--certainly more than the few hundred that swayed Florida into Bush's column in 2000, and perhaps enough to make a big difference this time around. This is, to a large extent, a case of many Americans simply not knowing certain truths, truths hidden by the administration and glossed over or discarded by the media. A lot of people will be leaving the theater in the next several weeks saying, "I didn't know...."

Fahrenheit 9/11 No. 1 at Box Office

Though it was expected to open behind the new Wayans Brothers film White Chicks, Fahrenheit 9/11 exceeded all expectations and shot to the top of the box office, bringing in between $8.2 to $8.4 million on its opening day. Moore's last film, Bowling for Columbine, broke all records for a documentary film by grossing $21.6 million, but Moore's new film may exceed that amount in its opening weekend alone.

Further, F-9/11 beat out White Chicks despite showing on only 1/3 as many screens.

Fahrenheit 9/11 Moving the Nation, But Not Without Hitches

This article from the San Francisco Chronicle tells of how F-9/11 is selling out shows--sometimes almost selling out morning and late-night shows--around the Bay Area. Some theaters are now setting aside the voluntary R-rating on the film and and letting teens under 17 into the theaters, and in response to the sold out shows, some theaters are adding midnight shows.

The film might also be already changing people's minds. According to the Chronicle article:

At the Century 14 Downtown theater in Walnut Creek, Matt Henley, a 37-year-old sales representative from Concord, said he was an independent who had not decided how to vote in November. He said, however, that a section of the film showing U.S. troops in Iraq speaking out against the war had a strong effect on him.

"That really hit me," he said. "That did tilt me toward the Democrats."

Much of today's entertainment news was about the film, some of it bad: the film is enjoying only a limited release on 848 screens nationwide (though that might just drive up per-screen revenues), and apparently there was not enough time to strike enough prints--only 700 had been completed in time, and so some theaters will have to wait a day to get prints. Also on the good side is the fact that with high weekend grosses, more theaters are likely to pick it up a week later. One can only hope that the film has legs and can maintain large audiences for more than the opening week--because you know, you can bet your life, that if ticket sales drop soon the right wing will start dancing about, calling the film a dud, a failure, what have you, no matter how many records it breaks for a documentary.

We have also learned the identity of one of Moore's embedded cameramen, one Urban Hamid, a Swedish-Iraqi journalist studying in the U.S. He's visited Iraq three times this year, and says, "Every time I go back, it seems it's gotten worse ... When I last went back, people were so tired and exhausted and had lost hope. It's extremely sad to see."

On the Internet Movie Database, almost 2500 users have rated the film, and it's not too hard to see which are conservative and which are liberals or moderates. On a scale of 1 to 10, 65.1% gave it a "9" or "10" rating, and 32.9% rated it as a "1" or "2," leaving only 2% for the 3-8 ratings. So people probably either love it or hate it--encouraging, since moderates seem to be going along with the "9" or "10" scores. Most likely, however, is that almost all of the 762 rock-bottom "1" votes were made by conservatives trying to trash the film without having seen it.

In the meantime, part IV of the right-wing attack on Moore consists of new filmmakers making anti-Moore documentaries (gee, I wonder who funded those), titled Michael Moore Hates America and Michael and Me. Sounds pretty pathetic, really.

Gee Whiz, No Political Bias in This Media

After more than a week of the media flagellating itself in worship of Reagan, revising history to the point of calling Reagan the most popular president in 50 years (Clinton and Bush Sr. were both more popular), saying he won the Cold War single-handed, and that he presided over the longest economic expansion in U.S. history (actually it was third, after Kennedy/Johnson and Clinton), that same "liberal media" is going just as strong in all but calling Clinton a liar in his new memoirs. While many stories do concentrate on the fantastic popularity and success of the book, when they touch on the content, they come up with headlines like "President Pinocchio's Tales Are Fascinating" (USA Today), "A Former President's Alternate Universe" (Toronto Star) or "Alternate Universe" (Washington Post), and focusing incessantly on Monica, Monica, and more Monica.

Piece of evidence #817 in the argument that the media is run by rabid liberals who just won't give the conservative side a chance. Those bastards.

Yet Another Attempt to Stop F-9/11

Yet another conservative action groups, this one called "Citizens United," yet again tried another tack in trying to stifle or stop Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 from being seen. This time, they're trying to bend election law to their advantage.

They're claiming that ads for F-9/11 which picture Bush would violate an FEC law that corporations cannot take out political ads 30 days before a convention and 60 days before an election. Fortunately, even if that tactic is successful, it would only limit 9/11 ads after July 31st, more than a month after its general release, and it would only mean that Bush's image would have to be cut out. It might, however, hurt DVD sales of the film, due out in October.

However, this is yet another example of the right wing going to any and every length imaginable to stop people from seeing this film--and frankly, I believe it is doing not much else than giving the film even more PR and sending even more people to the theaters--not to mention bolstering the morale of liberals, who see all of these attacks as signs of desperation on the right wing. If so many conservative feel they have to work so hard at nearly hopeless attempts to stops a few people from seeing the film, then they are very likely very, very worried about the effect this film could have.

So, what's next? They going to stand outside theaters like they do at abortion clinics and rant and scream at every patron going in?

Fahrenheit 9/11: Already Breaking Box Office Records

F-9/11, as it is now often called, got off to a galloping start, breaking ticket sales records in two New York Theaters where it started showing prior to the main release on Friday to help generate good word of mouth.

In both theaters, it broke box office records, selling more tickets than the opening days for "Men in Black" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

the film opens to wide release in 868 theaters in two days, and seems set to break a lot more records, the first of which would be the highest-grossing documentary film ever.

Fandango reports that advance ticket sales for F-9/11 outstripped not only the current No. 1 film, but also a big summer blockbuster. Moore's film alone accounted for 48% of all advance ticket sales, followed distantly by Dodgeball (11%) and Spiderman 2 (9%).

Wow.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Just got back from seeing the late show. Not only is it cheaper (only $11 instead of the usual $16, almost the cheapest you can get a ticket for in Japan), but the 10:15 pm showing of the latest Potter movie is the least likely to have busloads of unruly children. Sure enough, as I came to the theater, tons of kids were coming out--but the late show was adults-only. Actually, Potter 3 is not even supposed to come out for another week, but with the big releases they usually have sneak showings one and sometimes two weeks in advance. For those of you in the U.S. and Europe, it's been out for a few weeks and you've likely seen it reviewed half to death. This is for the Japan crowd then, I guess.

The film is beautifully shot--just crammed full of almost baroque detail, and an emphasis on establishing shots done just right. A few motifs take us through the film, like the school's clock with its massive pendulum by the main gate (representing the time theme expounded on near the end), and the Whomping Willow, doing everything from catching birds in a cloud of exploding feathers, to an amusingly abrupt seasonal change. Cuarón actually spent some effort emphasizing the seasons; one beautiful shot followed Hedwig the owl flying past scenery towards Hogwarts--scenery which beautifully and subtly segued from Autumn to Winter.

Radcliffe nailed the role of the pubescent Potter, moody and acerbic sometimes, playing well into the emotional transition Rowling has Harry going through at this time. Though Chris Columbus handled the first two films pretty well, Cuarón really shows us how it's done extremely well. One small example: as Harry is in the Dursley's kitchen, cleaning up, Harry turns away from his abusive family at the table to enjoy a private smile--until his Aunt Marge starts ripping into his parents, and you can see Harry's expression change, perfectly. Very well acted, but you can see the director's touch there as well--Columbus could not have pulled off things like that so well, and you see things like this throughout the film.

The Knight Bus is interestingly done--not great, but an amusing break from the plot. Sometimes the background magic is almost a but too much, too distracting, but it can be fun, and might even draw some viewers back to see what they missed the first time. And the background stuff is a lot darker here, and a bit more tongue-in-cheek than the last two films. However, when you look at the books, you see that they also read that way--Rowling doesn't really start getting serious in her writing until this story, anyway.

The book is adapted well for the film--including enough of the story, you don't really miss much--but parts have indeed been culled, like Harry's long stay at the Leaky Cauldron and Hermione's purchase of Crookshanks. A few things were rather noticeable, however, such as Lupin's failure to tell Harry about the genesis of the Marauder's Map, or the meaning of the four nicknames on it--and we are never told of the significance of the stag Patronus. Odd.

Rupert Grint does his usual good job of playing Ron as the comic relief without going overboard, and Emma Watson is better this time as Hermione, not being too much of the smarty-pants, and being a bit more human and understandable. There is even an interesting hand-holding scene between the two of them that I believe is not in the book--foreshadowing with the permission of Rowling, perhaps? Michael Gambon, however, is somewhat of a disappointment as Dumbledore. He has far less subtlety, and not nearly as good a voice or as gentle a face as Richard Harris gave the character. I think that, if they could have gotten him, Ian McKellan would have filled the role far better. Malfoy's character was disappointingly written as too much of a cowardly bumbler, going a bit too much farther than I'd like--you can't really take him seriously.

One thing you'll note is that the film seems not just darker than the first two, but also much more cramped, and the action much more fervent and agitated. In some scenes, like the confrontation at the Shrieking Shack, you feel downright claustrophobic; but it works, it contains, condenses and magnifies the effect of the action, in keeping with the visual tone of the film. At other times, Cuarón brings us scenes with no dialog, out in the open, which set just the right emotional tone--like the scene where Hagrid is skipping stones on the lake, especially the ending shot. The shot I was least pleased with was the final shot of Harry on his new Firebolt--it freezes him as he flies past, with a stupid-looking open-mouthed smile on his face. But other shots in the film more than make up for the occasional poorly-done shots like that.

One thing you'll also have to get used to is the altered geography. This film is very hilly, sometimes downright mountainous. Everything outside seems set in the side of a steep slope--and while it adds to the closed-in tone of the film, it directly contradicts what we've seen of Hogwarts before.

The special effects are very well done; Hagrid, for example, is made to seem even huger than before with even better FX sleight-of-hand that made Gandalf bigger and the hobbits smaller in The Lord of the Rings. The Marauder's Map in particular is done well--when I heard it described, I had my doubts, but the multi-folding nature of the map and the footprint-and-banner identification worked well. Sit through the ending credits (be prepared, they're very long) to the end, and you'll see them beautifully executed as parts of the Map, with some visual gags thrown in. When each of the major credits are shown, footsteps representing them are shown. most are just normal footprints walking this way and that, but the footsteps for John Williams (who wrote the music, and did a great job again) are moving in a dance pattern--and Hagrid's footsteps are appropriately represented as enormous. In other parts of the credits, you see what appear to be dog and owl footprints, and at one point, bare human feet changing into a dog's--an obvious reference to Sirius Black.

All in all, quite worth seeing--too bad that Cuarón is not doing the next film, but then The Goblet of Fire is mostly less dark than Azkaban (with the exception of Goblet's climax, of course). We'll see how that goes.

More on the F-9/11 Front

Moore's film was recently given an R-rating by the MPAA for "violent and disturbing images and for language." Moore is fighting this in public, even hiring former New York governor Mario Cuomo to argue for a PG-13.

Frankly, I'm on the fence on this one. Sure, a PG-13 would be better, and as Moore pointed out, kids 16 and under will soon be of an age where these issues will be of great importance--but quite frankly, I do not think that many kids under 17 will be crowding the theaters. The vast majority of the film's audience, I expect, will be adult viewers.

At least, this generates good coverage for the film, and if the MPAA rating story isn't good enough, then the conservative organization Move America Forward (they must have liked the name "MoveOn.org" so decided to rip it off) will surely help out. Its head, a guy named Howard Kaloogian (no, I didn't make that name up) has tried to stir things up.

How? By posting a list of email addresses for movie theaters that will soon be showing Moore's film and urging right-wingers to "speak up loudly and tell the industry executives that we don’t want this misleading and grotesque movie being shown at our local cinema."

This is stupid for two reasons: first, the campaign gives no specifics about what people should say, and will really just fall flat as an empty threat. I mean, what will people say? I'm not going to go to see movies at your theater any more? Please. Usually when a movie plays in an area, one theater chain only has it, meaning that no one can simply threaten to go to another theater chain to see the same movie. So are a large number of conservatives going to simply give up seeing movies because the theaters showed one movie they didn't like? Not gonna happen.

The second reason their move was stupid was that when they listed all the email addresses and other contact information for the movie theaters and chains, they made it accessible to everyone--including liberals, who promptly took up the task of contacting the theaters on the list and cheering them for running the film--and from what it seems, vastly outnumbering the conservatives calling to complain.

Oops.

---

UPDATE: An alert reader provided a Disinfopedia link which explains a good deal about the true nature of "Move America Forward." Just under the rather ludicrous claim that they are a "non-partisan" organization, they list their leadership as "Republicans" and "conservatives," mentioning Republican positions several times, not to mention dropping Reagan's name 13 times on the "About" page. Not a single liberal mentioned on the list. Big talk about how they attacked the Reagan miniseries and got it off broadcast TV. Yeah, that's non-partisan.

There was also a bit of a flap about the registered owner of the domain being "Russo Marsh and Rogers," a political PR firm that has strong ties with the GOP. Immediately after the WHOIS information was exposed by several web sites, the domain registration information was changed to remove any mention of Russo Marsh and Rogers.

I don't think there's any secret, though. These are obviously far-right foot-soldiers working for the GOP. So what's new?

August Release for Fahrenheit 9/11 in Japan

I just got off the phone with the people at Gaga-Humax, the Japan distributor for Fahrenheit 9/11 (Japanese title: "華氏911"). They say that while they have not decided on an exact date, the film will be released in Japan sometime during August. Their office (03-3589-7416) says that a specific release date will be decided sometime in the next week or two. When I learn of it, and which theaters it will show at in Tokyo, I will let you know.

Fox Loves Moore?

Either someone took over the Fox News editorial room at gunpoint and forced them to print this, or Fox News may have just run one of its only non-partisan stories on a political topic in God-knows-how-long--but either way, the Fox review of Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 is positively glowing. An excerpt:

But once "F9/11" gets to audiences beyond screenings, it won't be dependent on celebrities for approbation. It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail.

Or there's a third possibility, I suppose: that Moore's film is really so fantastically good that even partisan Republicans can't help but love it.

Except Bill O'Reilly, of course. But then O'Reilly is an idiot, even by Republican standards.

The Hunting of the President

The Hunting of the President, the spectacular novel by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons has been made into what looks like will be an incredible documentary--narrated by Morgan Freeman, no less--and will be released this coming weekend in the U.S. On the site I just linked to, you can watch a trailer for the movie; it looks fantastic. My main regret: it probably won't get much play here in Japan.

Fahrenheit 9/11 Trailer Now in Non-streaming QuickTime

Well, I don't have to host the non-streaming version of the Fahrenheit 9/11 trailer any more--Apple has a full-sized, non-streaming QuickTime version up. It's a good trailer--who's music is that at the start, by the way? Phillip Glass? (The film's original music was composed by Jeff Gibbs, who also did the music for Moore's Columbine flick, by the way.)

This paper reports on how the new Fahrenheit 9/11 web site melted down due to a blizzard of requests for the trailer--they had to take it down for a while. The QuickTime version of the trailer on that site is now hosted by Apple, meaning that it also is the non-streaming size. Apple to the rescue....

Journal from Tokyo

Everyone please visit a new blogger, Masa, as he begins his blog Journal from Tokyo. He is just starting out, but feels there is a need for more Japanese to be commenting on issues in English. I'll be adding his site to the link board the next chance I get, but I wanted to alert you that it's starting. Keep an eye on the site as it evolves.

Fahrenheit 9/11 Trailer

It can be found the the new Fahrenheit 9/11 web site. It is available in QuickTime and Windows Media. The main page (www.fahrenheit911.com) is just a static placard at the moment, no other content can be accessed.

Unfortunately, the trailer is streamed, not a downloadable file. I have no idea why they did this, it makes the trailer harder to watch at the larger sizes. I have at least 3 Mbps of bandwidth at my home account, several times more than most DSL accounts in the U.S., and the larger sized versions of the trailer had sound dropouts and/or video freezes. The small version played beautifully, though.

Thanks once again to Mark for the info!

Fahrenheit 9/11 Has a Distributor for June 25 Release

The New York Times is just now reporting that the independent Canadian Lions Gate Films has won the distribution rights for Moore's film, and that a release date of June 25 has been set. The film will be released on "about 1,000 theaters" in the U.S. Showtime, which caught the ditched Reagan miniseries, will show the film on pay cable.

If you go to Michael Moore's site, you'll see the initial flash screen confirms this, though there are as yet no details on the main page.

For those of us in Japan, I have found